This page shows how to remove i.simpli.fi from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Does this sound familiar? You see i.simpli.fi in your browser’s status bar while browsing sites that normally don’t load any content from third party domains. Maybe the i.simpli.fi domain appears when performing a search at the Google.com search engine?

Here is a screen capture on i.simpli.fi from my machine, which appeared in Firefox’ status bar while doing a search at Google:

Here are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s status bar:

• Waiting for i.simpli.fi …
• Transferring data from i.simpli.fi …
• Looking up i.simpli.fi …
• Read i.simpli.fi
• Connected to i.simpli.fi …

Does this sound like your computer, it’s possible you have some potentially unwanted program installed on your machine that makes the i.simpli.fi domain appear in your browser’s status bar. Don’t write angry emails to the website you were browsing, they are most likely not responsible for the i.simpli.fi status bar messages. The potentially unwanted program on your machine is. I’ll do my best to help you remove the i.simpli.fi message in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and purposely installed some potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I’ve been monitoring the actions on these systems to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the potentially unwanted program updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional potentially unwanted programs on the machines. I first found the i.simpli.fi in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab computers.

So, how do you remove i.simpli.fi from your browser? On the machine where i.simpli.fi showed up in the status bar I had BlockAndSurf, TinyWallet and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from i.simpli.fi .

The issue with this type of status bar message is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program running on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.

So, what can be done? To remove i.simpli.fi you need to check your machine for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove i.simpli.fi is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something strange-looking listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed about the same time as you started getting the i.simpli.fi statusbar messages.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Potentially unwanted program often show up under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to find and uninstall the potentially unwanted program with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’ve developed since 2006. Freefixer is a tool designed to manually identify and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve identified the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked down like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties determining if a file is clean or potentially unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains additional details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Did this blog post help you to remove i.simpli.fi ? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!

Update 2015-05-04: I’ve also seen the um.simpli.fi subdomain in use. Here’s two examples: