How to stop Time Warner cable search on Firefox for Android?

Question

I went into about:config and have the following:

browser.search.defaultenginename
Google

browser.search.official
true

browser.search.order.1
Google

keyword.URL
https://www.google.com/search?p=

And still, when I type in the search bar, it pulls up Time Warner Cable Road Runner search instead of Google. It looks like only if I have more than 1 word does it decide to use google -- maybe using only 1 word means I type a malformed URL? How can I fix this to use Google as a proper search engine?

Answer 1

Your issue is not related to Firefox but to your internet provider (Time Warner Cable). According to this site, it "hijacks" your browser's default DNS resolution failure behavior (also known as "404 page"), redirecting you to Road Runner.

Following this site instructions, you just have to go to Road Runner's preference page and disable the Web Address Error Redirect Service option then save.

Answer 2

When a hostname cannot be found in DNS, instead of letting your browser's DNS handle the condition Time Warner's servers search to come up with possible alternatives to what was sent as the web URI request.

You can (should) change the DNS servers for your Wi-Fi connection to be some public DNS servers such as Google's or OpenDNS's. If you are not using the Time Warner DNS servers, they cannot redirect a failed DNS lookup as they will not be handling the DNS.

Google's public DNS servers are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

For OpenDNS, you should set up a personal account there, even though it isn't absolutely necessary to use their public DNS server, there are some nice tools if you do so.

One other thing that should be noted here is that a "404 page" is something that is returned by a webserver that cannot locate a page within the site. This has absolutely nothing to do with DNS or what Time Warner is doing.

Answer 3

Change network.dns.disableIPv6 to "true" in about:config.