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I have used My Heritage Family Builder for over a year and passed along word about this excellent software to others.
I recently purchased a new laptop and this afternoon I downloaded their software again.
After I finished I restarted Firefox only to find that my homepage had been hijacked by a My Heritage Google page. There was also a toolbar from My Heritage and they had hijacked my default search provider in the toolbar at the top right of Firefox.
I uninstalled the software and I still had to manually remove their search option from the search bar at the top right.
I have informed My Heritage that this is unacceptable and I consider it hijacking and spam. I am now in the process of warning others about their poor practices.
My Heritage is no longer on my computer and will not found there until they stop hijacking personal computers.
Truthfully nowadays,when you download internet explorer,firefox,bear share,and millions of other applications;they ALL ask you to make their page your home page and also a specific search engine to be your default.You personally have to read every page and to accept or decline it.
I downloaded this software a while ago for IE. I unticked the add search boxes and now I get an error everytime I click a link in IE. Switched over to Firefox as a short term fix. Will be forgettinh My Heritage
Truthfully nowadays,when you download internet explorer,firefox,bear share,and millions of other applications;they ALL ask you to make their page your home page and also a specific search engine to be your default.You personally have to read every page and to accept or decline it.
Let me make it more clear to you as I was not as detailed in my original post as I should have been.
There is a dialog box that comes up when you install Family Tree Builder. Your choices are Standard or Custom.
The Standard radio button is chosen by default. This option includes the items that hijack your browser. It doesn't say so explicitly, but it does.
The Custom items (which are FTB and the hijack items with check boxes) is a very light gray. So light, in fact, that I cannot see them without my glasses. Most software developers show the common courtesy of making these choices obvious. By making them hard to see My Heritage makes it obvious that they are trying to mislead those who choose to try their software.
To fulfill your conditions of "being asked" I clicked on the Custom radio button and removed the check marks from the hijack items.
After I finished the installation of the software I opened Firefox and lo, and behold, they were there. So even if you ask them to NOT install their hijack items they do anyway.
I have a problem with a company that flat out lies to it's customers. My Heritage is doing so when users uncheck those boxes and they install their hijack software.
Again, I advise everyone to avoid any company that acts in such a dishonest manner. You have to wonder what they are installing on your computer that they aren't mentioning in their installation.
You downloaded Bear Share? I automatically remove that software from any client computer I work on.
From Wikipedia:
"Three variations of BearShare were distributed by Free Peers: Free, Lite and Pro. The Free version had more features than the Lite version, but also contained some malware such as a trojan horse, or adware. The Lite version was malware-free, but had fewer features than the Free version."
Been there. done that with telco software that i tested on a bench machine. It took six hours to line edit out every tiny piece of hidden code. I had these same problems with an older verison of genealogy software. It stopped working when I removed the 3rd party software. These examples are the best reason in the world to install genealogy software on a machine that is never connected to the internet.
Shame on the ruthless companies who will go to any means to scrape content for profit.
I too had My Heritage "kidnap" my Home Page, and since the program didn't do what I expected anyway, I uninstalled it. That didn't release my Home Page so I went back and did a "restore" and that was no help. Not only is it a nuisance, it also slows down the download of my Home Page. Looks like I must get someone smarter than me to get it cleaned up.
I downloaded it less than 2 years to my PC and I don't remember ever having any problems. It has been just fine. *shrug*
I use Firefox also.
Same here. The older downloads were different than the current one. Thanks for this reminder. I wonder if I have a saved copy of the older version somewhere. I am a pack rat...
I too had My Heritage "kidnap" my Home Page, and since the program didn't do what I expected anyway, I uninstalled it. That didn't release my Home Page so I went back and did a "restore" and that was no help. Not only is it a nuisance, it also slows down the download of my Home Page. Looks like I must get someone smarter than me to get it cleaned up.
Go to the page you want as your homepage. Then
In Internet Explorer Pull down the Tools menu, click on Internet Options. On the General tab click Use Current. It's towards the top and shows the current one in a white text box.
In Firefox pull down the Tools menu and click on Options. On the General tab click Use Current Pages. It's towards the top and shows the current one in a white text box. Notice it says use current pages. Only have the single tab with the page you want as your homepage open. Firefox will save multiple pages as homepages.
I really enjoy the software, of course my version may be an older one. I downloaded it probably in 2008.
It keeps asking me to upgrade, but I don't see any reason to. My version is 2.0.0.676. It wants me to upgrade to 4.0.0.897
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So even if you ask them to NOT install their hijack items they do anyway. 
