Why does Boingo keep appearing in my Firefox browsing history?

January 1, 2015 11:58 PM

Every time I visit Facebook, my Firefox history tab inexplicably lists "Boingo | the worldwide leader in wi-fi software and services." When I click on it, it takes me to my FB page. I'm totally confused why it's there or how to get rid of it. Any advice?
posted by Lillitatiana to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

How are you connecting to the internet? It sounds to me like you might be on a wireless network with a captive portal supplied or powered by Boingo. Sometimes this can do weird things with browsing histories.
posted by fearnothing at 12:27 AM on January 2, 2015

Response by poster: I have Time Warner Cable and not a captive portal (as far as I can see).
posted by Lillitatiana at 12:46 AM on January 2, 2015

Isn't Boingo a wifi provider for airplanes and/or hotels? Have you used them for that? Maybe they had you install something that phones home.
posted by rhizome at 12:49 AM on January 2, 2015

What happens if you delete it from your history - does it comes back?
posted by quinndexter at 1:08 AM on January 2, 2015

If you ever used the computer at public location served by Boingo WiFi and tried to connect to it, or possibly if you are syncing your Firefox history with a computer that did, this can occur. Basically, Firefox got confused into recording the "Boingo ..." page title as the title for the facebook.com web address, which is why it doesn't go away. If you manually delete the history entry, it should go away.
posted by Aleyn at 1:18 AM on January 2, 2015 [5 favorites]

Firefox is also notorious for broken profile settings. Consider deleting the profile and creating a new one. It may be possible to simply rename the old profile, and recover some settings, IRDK; check Google.
posted by IAmBroom at 6:41 AM on January 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

This has occurred for me when using Chrome after being in an airport.
It occurs because Chrome periodically downloads a site's title and favicon to display locally and it just happened that Chrome downloaded a site's information as I was in an airport. Since every request made while using a Boingo hotspot must first hit the boingo page, that's the information that got grabbed.

It will go away next time your browser decides to refresh it's local information (a few days at most).
posted by lalunamel at 6:46 AM on January 2, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: If I delete it from my history, it always comes back, and it is always there whenever I connect to FB. Truly strange.
posted by Lillitatiana at 2:50 PM on January 2, 2015

might be an add on opening the page. check for anything strange or uneeded and disable to see if thats the cause.
posted by nalyd at 4:14 PM on January 2, 2015

Firefox is also notorious for broken profile settings. Consider deleting the profile and creating a new one.

Firefox has a reset feature that does something similar. That might be worth playing around with.
posted by Avelwood at 5:05 PM on January 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Ah, I figured it out. I had the page in my bookmarks toolbar, and must have placed it there while en route somewhere when Boingo was providing the wifi. I deleted it from the toolbar and replaced it and now it's no longer showing as Boingo. Thank you all for your help!
posted by Lillitatiana at 12:12 AM on January 4, 2015