Browser hijacking Some adware uses Sear4m.xyz to cause a user to click on Sear4m.xyz ads. Once Sear4m.xyz is installed, it changes the default DNS settings of browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet explorer, and often redirect to various fake websites which are often laiden with viruses. Searchassist is a browser hijacker which piggybacks on other downloads from untrusted websites. It will change the new tab homepage to searchassist.net and opens searchassist on browser start-up. It is stubborn, and if not uninstalled, will repeatedly change the browser tabs and homepage settings. It works with Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer, though
Google Chrome results in a "Sad Tab" screen of death, similar to the well-known "Sad Mac", but only one tab crashes instead of the whole application. This strategy exacts a fixed per-process cost up front, but results in less memory bloat over time as fragmentation is confined to each instance and no longer needs further memory allocations. This architecture was adopted in Safari and Firefox. Chrome includes a process management utility called "Task Manager" which lets users see what sites and plugins are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and overusing the CPU and provides the ability to terminate them.