Home Conticreative Blogs Web Dev blog Unistall Norton Toolbar from Firefox

Blogs - Web Technologies Blog

Unistall Norton Toolbar from Firefox

Written by Marco Conti Friday, 23 April 2010 12:58

Share |

Recently my ISP, Comcast, switched their Anti-Virus suite from McAfee to Norton. Frankly I am not a big fan of either suite but since between my work and my family  we have 9 active computers (and a couple of straddlers) the cost of buying a decent Anti-virus suite every year could be considerable and the Comcast Norton 360 offering is free and I can install it on all my computers.

However, when Norton 360 is installed it also installs 2 add-ons in Firefox. These add ons are very intrusive and impossible to eliminate using traditional methods.

After a bit of research I found out I am not the only one wanting to get rid of these "features" from Norton, yet no set instructions I have found so far worked for me.

I am now publishing my method, which hopefully will work for others as well. This is a modified version of the fix found here and here. Neither method worked for me as presented but I was able to use the info to find my own system.

One of the problems with Norton is that it cannot be unistalled. The button is greyed out in the Plug-in manager. In my case, deactivating it only worked for one session at the time. After relaunching both Norton plug-ins would be active again.

• First of all, let's go to this link:
  %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
• Next, open one of the folders relative to your active profile (you may want to do it in both profiles)
• Look for a file called extensions.rdf and open it in a text editor
  NOTE: If you have Dreamweaver or an XML editor, use that. It will help with formating and color coding
• Instead of looking for certain keys as illustrated on the other tutorials mentioned above, search for the word "norton". Again, Dreamweaver is helpful here because it will list the results in a window you can click to go to each instance rapidly.

Now look for code formatted like this:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mozilla:item:{8545daff-ad1e-493f-a37e-eed1ac79682b}"

NS1:installLocation="app-global"

NS1:version="1.0"

NS1:iconURL="chrome://ipsffpl/skin/norton.png"

NS1:locked="true"

NS1:name="Norton IPS"

NS1:description="Symantec Corporation"

NS1:creator="Symantec Corporation"

NS1:homepageURL="http://www.symantec.com"

NS1:userDisabled="needs-disable">

<NS1:type NC:parseType="Integer">2</NS1:type>

<NS1:targetApplication RDF:resource="rdf:#$7Sqz.2"/>

</RDF:Description>

I have to confess I have no idea what this code means but it's pretty obvious that if you delete from <ref to </rdf you eliminate the instance of Norton "something".

In my file there were 2 instances (one per plug-in) and I deleted both.
(Please make sure to keep a copy of the file somewhere just in case)

After deleting the instances and saving the file I restarted Firefox several times and the plug-ins were gone.

Interestingly, I have been trying to delete other, unrelated, plugins and my Firefox is refusing to get rid of them, but this is probably unrelated.

I apologize for the total lack of profound technical info in regard to this hack. The innards of Firefox are not my usual stomping ground. All I am trying to do is to try and help others getting rid of these Norton pests.

Good luck.