Norton Cloud Killed Pale Moon 9.0.1

[Night Wing]

Let me say I'm a computer illiterate person and even though I love the Pale Moon and Firefox browsers, I hate these rapid release updates for fear of something "going wrong". Today, it happened.

I'm typing this message using Firefox 9.0 because Norton Internet Security 2012 killed Pale Moon (9.0.1) 32-bit. Let me explain what happened.

I've been using Pale Moon (8.0) 32-bit. When I saw Pale Moon updated to (9.0.1), I clicked on update and all was going well. Then, when the updater was checking the compatibility for my two add-ons (IE Tab V2 & NoSquint), a Norton box came up and said, "Norton Cloud 7 noticed suspicious activity" and then then it said "Norton Cloud 7 removed the suspicious activity".

I then watched the spinning indicator spin for 15 minutes and was dreading the worst. I had a feeling my worst fears would come true and it subsequently did. At the 20 minute mark, I clicked on "Cancel" and tried to bring up Pale Moon (9.0.1). The browser came up, but not my home start page. Just a blank colored white page. I clicked on the blue PM button, went to Help and noticed I had version (9.0.1) 32-bit installed. I closed out Pale Moon and tried to restart the browser by double clicking the Pale Moon icon on my Desktop.

The browser came up. It shows the blue Pale Moon button, the home, back/forward, new tab, history, IE Tab V2, NoSquint, spinning wheel buttons, the address bar, my personal bookmarks toolbar and that's it.

No home page. Just a blank white colored page and in the address bar, it says, "go to website". I shut down my computer, then turned my computer back on, let everything load and when I clicked on my PM icon to bring up the browser, the same thing happened. I have the browser, but a blank page. Any website address I type in in the address bar takes me nowhere. The blank white colored page remains.

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Is there anyway to fix this? I'm assuming Norton Internet Security 2012 will not allow me to use the Pale Moon browser anymore.

In closing, this is why computer illiterate people like me refuse or hate to update browsers. When we update a browser, it's like a crap shoot and we're playing against Murphy's Law.

I was thinking of uninstalling PM (9.0.1) and reinstalling it without losing my personal data (bookmarks in the personal Bookmarks toolbar) and hoping this might work. But, I'm not going to until I (hopefully) get a response from Moonchild.

[Trala]

Night Wing, I'm not speaking for anyone but myself but what you could at least do is copy (not cut) the "Moonchild Productions" folder from the AppData\Roaming folder (if you're on Win 7) to a safe place so that you don't lose anything in there. That folder basically contains everything pertaining to your particular install of Pale Moon and includes your bookmarks, extensions, etc.

But yes, normally you should be able to re-install while retaining your profile data, if, when you uninstall the previous install of Pale Moon, you don't choose to remove your personal settings (so be aware of this when you uninstall, not to select that box).

What Norton IS did to your install of Pale Moon we can only guess at at this point, and if it messed with your aforementioned profile folder your new install of Pale Moon may suffer from the same problems. But if you take the precaution of backing up your profile folder and choose not to remove your personal settings while uninstalling your crippled install of Pale Moon, and then install it fresh again, this should work if your profile folder is intact. However, while you still have Pale Moon installed, you may try to add its program files and such to Norton safe list (or whatever Norton calls it).

I've never been a fan of Norton (well maybe a long, long time ago) and this is not going toward my love for it. But it has improved a lot over the last years. Other than this I wouldn't know what to tell you.

[satrow]

Norton NIS, you pay for that program, right? Why don't you report a false positive to Symantec and get them to put it right?

I'll see if I can ask them to straighten out their detection.

[Night Wing]

Thanks people for the help. I'm still using Firefox to type this message.

I sent Norton a very nasty response. I know Norton won't like it, but I don't care. I'm going to get my next door neighbor to come over and help me. He's computer savvy. I'm computer illiterate and totally helpless.

I have a bad feeling my profile folder is corrupted so backing it up while it's corrupted won't help me. I know my neighbor knows how to back up my bookmarks to a folder on my Desktop so I'm going to ask him to do that, make a new profile, then put back my bookmarks and then delete the corrupted default profile leaving the new profile and hope this works and leaves me with a working version of (9.0.1).

I'm so frustrated right now.

[megaman]

The problem here is that it acted on its own. Disabling it while you install the updates is recommended, and adding anything PM(Anything in the obvious folders, malware can go to other folders and act like they are legit) to it's White List is also required.

Emsisoft picks up PM as a High Risk, must be the same thing Norton picked up.
Either way, it's a false-positive and you might have it on the Quarantine section, maybe just file a report like cymroly said.

Also, in order for things to go smoothly, it's advised to clean install the new versions, but that's off-key. < Is not necessary in most cases, but it's a tip.

[satrow]

Symantec have been contacted and replied requesting further info, I've supplied what I can, I'm hoping they'll get working on this very soon.

Night Wing, if you can report this via the false positive URL I put in the 3rd post, add this response number [2658251] so that they know it's the same issue.

[Night Wing]

When I was updating from Pale Moon 7.0 to 8.0, Norton didn't gave me any problems. Now, when going from 8.0 to 9.0.1, Norton kills my browser.

BTW, Norton came the my computer when I bought it. One of my friends doesn't use a firewall or antivirus software. He uses a sandbox program called Sandboxie and I'm now seeing why he does. He never has any problems downloading files or updating his browsers using his sandboxed Firefox browser.

I'm thinking, just thinking, of doing the same thing.

[megaman]

Yes, we use Sandboxie for testing purposes, in case we do come across a virus or something, but don't rely on it. Keep an antivirus handy. Also, the reason of the process could be because of an update perhaps? Update = New signatures.

[Moonchild]

I have already contacted Norton last time not too long ago when their software started tripping over the portable version.

Do note that they suggested that I join their "software vendor program" in response after whitelisting the dll it tripped over, which I am not going to do for the simple reason that it is their software that is broken, not mine. it is not my task to notify any and all "security" vendors under the sun ahead of time about new releases so they can add it to a custom whitelist to work around their own broken scanning engines.

The internet community at large has scowled many times at Norton and its broken heuristics, and it's become even worse with these "Suspicious.Cloud" hits (same trigger as the last time I contacted them) which simply indicates their servers are too paranoid and mark anything new that is NOT mainstream and "pre-announced" to them specifically as "High risk".

You should, at all times, set up your antivirus/antimalware package to ask when it finds something "suspicious" and not have it do things "automatically".
I also strongly suggest you get rid of Norton and find something better so this doesn't happen again in the future.
You should also be able to restore the component that was removed by going to your quarantine area in NIS 2012 and restore the file. I suspect it quarantined a browser component DLL which is needed for external components to function (resulting in your failure to load your profile)

[Night Wing]

Moonchild,

Well, I'm now back typing this message with Pale Moon v9.0.1 and I'm a happy camper. Woohoo!

I know this morning's problem for me was caused by Norton (Symantec) and was not the fault of anything due to Pale Moon in any shape or form.

With the above said, my neighbor came over and he is computer savvy. Anyhow, he first backed up all of my 150 bookmarks comprised in 17 folders. Then he deleted all of my bookmark folders from the Bookmarks Toolbar. Next, he deleted my IE Tab V2 and NoSquint extensions from (v9.0.1). Suspecting the original default profile was corrupted, he then showed me how to make a new profile which we called "New Profile". Then he deleted the original "Default" profile. Then he uninstalled (v9.0.1).

He then downloaded a fresh copy of (9.0.1) and Norton did it's Cloud thing again and he told it to ignore whatever Norton found suspicious. Pale Moon 9.0.1 came up and and brought us to the Pale Moon home page.

He then loaded back all of my 17 folders with all of my bookmarks into the Bookmarks Toolbar of (9.0.1). He clicked on about ten of my bookmarks to make sure they were working. He then went to the Firefox site and proceeded to download the "IE Tab V2 and NoSquint" extensions and confirmed these two extensions were working properly.

It took my next door neighbor about 25 minutes to do all of this. I offered to pay him some cash money, but he flatly refused. Instead; he told me the first trip I take down to the Gulf of Mexico down at Galveston, Texas for a crabbing trip when the month of April gets here, to take him along. I said, "Okay then". My neighbor is a good guy and I'm very glad he's computer savvy.

In closing, it's good to have Pale Moon back again.

[1crazypj]

I just had exact same issue.
I wasn't paying complete attention and now Palemoon is no more.
I'll contact Norton but that doesn't solve the immediate issue (I'm using Firefox for this)
Unfortunately I don't have a neighbor who can back up everything for me then re-install.
OK, Followed real simple instructions on previous page, going to close Firefox and see if it worked by restoring files from quarantine

[1crazypj]

Brilliant, worked perfect, lot easier than I expected.
Feels just like the previous release

[Night Wing]

1crazypj,

I have a backup computer and it's running Windows XP. It had both Pale Moon 8.0 and Firefox 8.0 on it. This computer also has the free version of Avast installed on it, not Norton.

Unlike Norton, which came with and is running on my main Windows 7 (64-bit) computer, Avast let me download to the updated versions of Pale Moon 9.0.1 and Firefox 9.0.1 on my Windows XP backup computer without any problems.

I still have 277 days left on my current subscription of Norton. I don't want this problem to happen again when I'm going to update to Pale Moon 10.0 when this version debuts so I'm seriously thinking of deleting Norton completely from my Windows 7 computer and replacing it with the free version of Avast.

I also sent a nasty rely to Norton (Symantec) on the day it happened to me, but since you had this same problem happen to you, Norton doesn't seem to care about fixing this problem they have with Pale Moon.

[satrow]

Reply received from Symantec stating that Pale Moon is clean and their next definitions update will put it right.

(Until the next time you update a legitimate program.)