After installing MB, strange behavior ...

[YukiTaga]

After installing Malwarebytes, on Chromium based browsers like Chrome, Opera and Vivaldi, I'm experiencing strange behavior with drop down choice boxes (menus) on those browsers. Instead of a normal drop down list, where you'd select one and get some result, another page opens. It's solid black, except that the drop down choice menu is actually displayed in the upper left corner of that black page. And it works. All the choices are there, and clickable. When you choose one, this black page disappears, and the main page knows what you chose. And you can escape-key from it without choosing anything.

But it's weird, folks.

The behavior is not present in Firefox. Those drop down menus act as drop down choice boxes work like drop down choice boxes always have.

Anyone with any ideas ... I'd love to hear from you.

Yuki

[Firefox]

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[YukiTaga]

Thanks for the detailed reply covering the way to go about this.

It's clear to me now, however, that this issue has nothing to do with Malwarebytes. Some are suggesting it has to do with flags set in Chrome. Unfortunately, there is just a freaking ton of flags now, and having set a rather small handful in the past, and failing to log those, I cannot remember for the life of me which ones I modified, or imagine even that any of them, mostly rather innocent tweaks, would be a cause. So, rather than "set all to default", which would undo things I'm sure I don't want undone, I downloaded the Chrome beta. Immediately, problem resolved. But only on Google Chrome. The other chromium based browsers continue to exhibit the undesired behavior. Go figure. Thanks again for your response.

[exile360]

The only setting I can think of which might affect how anything is displayed/rendered would be turning on/off hardware acceleration (default is On) so I'd suggest checking that setting in your browsers to see if that's the culprit.

[YukiTaga]

Thanks. Yes, it's commonly suggested. But it didn't change any behavior on my system, on or off.

[exile360]

Is it anything like what is shown/described here?  If so, then you could give his suggested potential fixes a try (you've already done some of them on your own).

You could also try running ADWCleaner to see if it finds any unwanted pugins/extensions which might be causing the issue.  Scan with it and have it remove anything it finds, restarting your computer if prompted to do so to complete the removal process, then test again to see if the issue is resolved.

[YukiTaga]

It's close to that, but not the same. Never happens on a new URL to me. Only when clicking on a dropdown menu item. Then, I get a black screen, but it doesn't quite fill the browser window like that, but very close, a matter of a few pixels. And on that black page, is the dropdown menu, displayed in the upper left hand corner. Not the menu itself, but all the expanded choices. And they're clickable, which immediately closes the black window, and the still open site window acts as if nothing unusual happened. It recognizes and accepts the choice I made in the black window.

You can also make no choice, and hit escape, and the black window disappears.

I've run all the typical "exotic" malware programs, and come up empty. I'm pretty sure now that this is some chromium issue. In any case, for me, on Chrome, it's gone away since I started running the beta (which imports almost all my stuff from the normal Chrome, so if there was anything malevolent there, I think it would be on the beta, too). Yet, on all the other chromium based browsers (not Firefox), I see the same thing. Fortunately, I use the other browsers for other things, so I don't even know if that's going on with them until I check. It will be interesting to see as those are updated what is still going on or not going on.

I am guilty, over time, of having set a few flags on Chrome. I wish I'd logged them, and from now on I will. Google warns that these are experimental things, and that they can stop functioning, or even disappear, without any warning, and with possibly unpredictable results. So it could just be something like that.

Thanks

[exile360]

Yeah, there's not telling what might be the cause then.  I guess you could try restoring one of the affected browsers to its default settings and start from square one with setting up your modifications and customizations, testing one by one as each change is made until you find the culprit then make a note of the offender and roll it back, then undo that same setting across the other affected browsers.  I don't know of another way to root out the cause given the circumstances unfortunately.  On the plus side, there are portable versions of most browsers based on Chromium, so you can always keep an active backup with all of your bookmarks etc. on hand in case one of the installed versions gets corrupted, that way at least you avoid any downtime.

[YukiTaga]

That's probably what I'll do (restore to default). I didn't want to do that with Chrome, because it would be such a pain to input stuff again for so many sites. But the other browsers serve other functions, so it's a good idea to do that with one of them.

Thanks.

[exile360]

Sure, no problem

One alternative, assuming you can remember at least most of the changes/tweaks you've made to the browser(s), would be to use a portable build to start modifying your settings from scratch and testing after each change in the hopes that you discover which one causes this behavior, then undo that setting/change in the other browsers to eliminate the problem, however unless you can recall each and every one of them it will be slow going with no guarantee of success (not that it's guaranteed the other way either, but at the very least you'd end up with nothing more than a modified portable build which is disposable anyway).