Samsung Internet Browser

[Khedrac]

I recently decided to take the plunge and get a smartphone. I bought a second hand Samsung Galaxy S6 and changed my Pay-as-you-go provider (the previous one was putting their prices up just too much, even though my average annual spend used to be £10 so price didn't matter that much).

Now generally I like the phone (mainly for the messaging) but I am slowly beginning to find apps to install (starting with Waze and Three Little Words) but I have an issue - Samsung Internet Browser (or SIB).

So far I have yet to browse the intenet on my phone (and will probably use Firefox if I do) - but SIB likes to randomly start itself and then display random pages. I think it may only be doing it when I have WiFi active, but I don't think it is only doing it when there is free WiFI which means it is actively costing me money...

The "Disable" option of SIB is disabled and searching the internet suggests that it cannot be uninstalled (the closest suggestion was to remove all updates which reverted it to "Internet Browser" but that doesn't seem secure and it just leads to the patches being re-applied and the problem restarting).

I have pretty much all the permissions disabled for SIB but it still keeps doing it. Does anyone have any useful advice?

[Hunter Noventa]

What kind of pages is it showing? It might very well be some kind of malware that didn't get swept away when the phone was cleared out before resale.

[LordEntrails]

I would check for options/settings like Automatically connect to wifi and such. It's (probably) not anything actually to do with SIB, but rather you phone is trying to do something and it is just opening the default browser. You can test that by installing a different web browser and making it the default browser and see if it starts opening.

[Khedrac]

Thank-you for the feedback and suggestions, however:

It's not the default browser - I made that Firefox when I got the phone.

As for the pages, right now it shows foodandsciencez.com, it tends to be tech, health or food-type sites, the previous site was emotionalintelligence.xyz.

Hmm, trying various things while typing this I found that despite a cleared history I had over 20 tabs open - mainly these rogue sites - so I have closed all the tabs in case they have been open all the time and were just surfacing.

[Silfir]

Just to be clear, did you do a full reset of some sort after you got this? It definitely doesn't sound like something a clean phone would be doing.

[Khedrac]

Just to be clear, did you do a full reset of some sort after you got this? It definitely doesn't sound like something a clean phone would be doing.

Me - no, and I think that is the next step. I bought it from a CEX tech exchange shop that I thought had done that properly, now I guess I need to find out how to do a full reset myself. If you know can suggest the best place to go for instructiosn it will be really helpful.
(Yes I lose current calendar and contacts, but better now that when I have had the phone longer.)

[DeTess]

Me - no, and I think that is the next step. I bought it from a CEX tech exchange shop that I thought had done that properly, now I guess I need to find out how to do a full reset myself. If you know can suggest the best place to go for instructiosn it will be really helpful.
(Yes I lose current calendar and contacts, but better now that when I have had the phone longer.)

These two should probably cover it:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile...one-or-tablet/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile...set-galaxy-s6/

Based on what I read skimming those articles a basic factory reset wouldn't ave done anything to a piece of malware. It might also be worthwhile downloading a piece of anti-virus software and checking whether those pick up anything first before doing the full erase and reset.

[Khedrac]

In trying to look for more options I acccidentally stumbled on leave feedback on the Play Store - so I left some negative feedback.
Cue an email saying there's been a response...

It looks like the lastest reviews from a whole load of people are reporting the same problem, and Samsung are busy identifying a list of the culprit applications, headed up by "Peel Remote" (which is now disabled on my phone).
If I understood correctly these apps are paging web pages and using Samsung's Internet Browser to display them (even when it's not default).

So, I have disabled Peel Remote and as yet I am clean of random web pages - so the moral is that now 99% of people live on social media, check the feedback pages for the latest technical support!

Now to go and edit my feedback in a positive direction.