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I've never been able to confirm if it's true or not but around 2014/2015, I had a malicious Firefox extension that apparently originated from Google Chrome. What it did was basically put ads on all webpages, including blank pages and it was really hard to remove because it would just keep reinstalling itself until I uninstalled Chrome and then found and deleted the folder that contained the origin of the malware.
I wasn't able to do much research on my own, mostly because I didn't really know how to, but everyone online (possibly including Mozilla themselves) who was infected by the malware believed that Chrome downloaded the malicious Firefox extension. The main reason people believed it was because not only did the malware only seem to infect users who had both Chrome and Firefox installed but the origin of the malware would keep reinstalling itself until you removed either Chrome or Firefox and stuck with just one browser.
The old search engine hijackers were honestly the worst malware I had to deal with somewhat regurarly
Anything more serious either cleaned up with malwarebytes or warranted reformatting the hard drive, but the hijackers were relatively easy but annoying and tedious to get rid off
The old search engine hijackers
I literally just cleaned up a computer at my wife's workplace that had a hijacker on it like 2 weeks ago.
It's honestly impressive how many ways there are to hide those just in the browser's configs
To be fair her teaching assistant put it on there and she has a tendency of clicking on everything and just isn't computer literate at all so it was more of an inevitability than anything. It installed a reskinned Chromium that redirected searched so it wasn't super bad. is ran MalwareBytes and got a few more possible threats too. Glad it wasn't anything super severe. I'm out of practice lol.
Yeah, thankfully the modern ones are usually pretty easy to clean, I remember searching through configs for variations of the fake search engine