Watch Out For The Landscape Scroller Rogue Browser Extension

Landscape Scroller is a rogue browser extension that functions largely as a browser hijacker.

Browser hijackers are classified as potentially unwanted applications and would generally alter certain settings in your browser without the user's explicit knowledge and consent. In the case of Landscape Scroller, the extension offers a replacement for your new blank tabs, placing landscape imagery in the new tabs. The description provided on the Chrome web store page simply states that "Microsoft Bing will power the New Tab Search."

What it does not disclose really well is that when you use the custom new tab search bar, your search query will first be bounced through search dot landscapescroller dot net before you get the regular Bing results page.

You never want to have middleware search engines of this sort, largely because they're all fake and cannot produce their own results, as is the case here too, and because you don't want your search queries being siphoned through a middleman and potentially logged and stored.

If you have Landscape Scroller installed in your Chrome, it would probably be wise to uninstall the extension and restore your new tab to using the default search engine you had before.