How to remove Comcast Xfinity default home page and default search

Oh how I hate Comcast, let me count the ways.  Beyond frequent drops, poor service, terrible billing and mass confusion, hysteria and poor technical understanding at Comcast’s technical support I have found a new reason to dislike this corporation with a monopoly in my region.  Specifically, I installed Comcast at a commercial facility recently and used my laptop as the tech did not bring equipment to perform the installation (at the wrong date and time).  So, he requested I install the Comcast “software” to perform the installation.  I did this and we were able to get everything working after some time with him on the phone with Business Class support to get our fixed IP configured.

The next time I used the laptop, I found that all browsers had been unknowingly and unwillingly commandeered by an Xfinity default home page and Xfinity default search.  Seriously Comcast?  On to the removal.

Firefox Removal
For the homepage change, go to the Firefox button in the upper left or Tools if you are still using a menu bar.  Choose options from tools or options then options from the Firefox button.  In the General Tab, you can choose what firefox does when it opens.  Xfinity will have set it to their link and you simply change this to nothing or back to default.

For the search change, click the down arrow in the upper right search box where you see the Xfinity logo.  You should see Xfinity listed as well as an option to manage search engines.  Choose manage search engines, select Xfinity and remove.

Google Chrome Removal
For the homepage change click on the three bars at the top right of Google Chrome which is their menu.  Then choose settings from this menu.  You will see an option that says on startup.  You can click the set pages blue text to change the default web page or open new tab or continue where i left off.

For the search engine change, click on the manage search engines button under search.  Click on the search engine you want as default then click make default.  Select Xfinity and click the X on the right to delete this service/option.

Internet Explorer 8 Removal
For the homepage change, click on the gear icon in the upper right to bring up the settings, then choose internet options.  On the general table there is a homepage box where you can use default, blank or change the Xfinity option.

For the search engine change, on the general tab there is a change search defaults row with a settings button.  Click this and then remove the Xfinity system and choose your desired default option.

These methods are changing with time and I didn’t choose to do screenshots in this walk-through but I hope it will help some people who might not otherwise know how to remedy this Comcast blunder.

5 thoughts on “How to remove Comcast Xfinity default home page and default search

  1. Yeah I hate them too for doing this. This is so lame …

    Anyway, stumbled on your website when trying to do the same in Chrome. Some instructions online say to remove it through the preferences but it did not work for me (my preferences were already set to ‘open blank page’ and I still got their page).

    The solution is to open:
    ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Preferences

    And to search for the line :
    “homepage”: “http://www.comcast.net/xfinity/?attr=osx&cid=insDate06232012”,

    Replace the right part of the line with something else (I like ‘about:blank’ which opens a blank page).

    Hope this helps.

    thomas

  2. I worked from home and had this issue come up.
    Cleared history/cache.
    My homepage is defaulted back but somehow explorer still switches back to xfinity log in even when I am on other networks!
    I can manually type in my destination page in explorer and xfinity overrides the request.

    • Clearing the history/cache does not impact the Comcast / Xfinity settings.

      Which IE version are you using? If you change the homepage default, you also need to change the search default from Xfinity to something else like google. Otherwise, your browser will keep using Xfinity for searching.

      This setting isn’t network dependent, it is browser dependent so which network you are on has no effect on this interference by Xfinity.

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