[PLUG-TALK] Find name of program to uninstall it

John Jason Jordan johnxj at gmx.com
Sun Sep 10 01:51:18 UTC 2023


While fiddling with application launch menus in Xubuntu 22.04.3 I find
under the folder 'Internet' a program with the useless name 'Web.'
Looking at the ~/.config/menus/xfce-applications.menu file, under the
'Network' folder (which appears in the panel as 'Internet' rather than
'Network') I see about ten .desktop files, but none of them are
anywhere close to the 'Web' in the menu, plus I know what each .desktop
file launches, and none of them launch 'Web.'

I launched the 'Web' application, which turns out to be a web browser
and, although fairly simple and minimal, I was immediately staring at a
web page for CenturyLink. Now, that is super suspicious, because
CenturyLink is my ISP. On the other hand, how the heck could they
install a web browser of their choosing on my computer? I did some
further poking in the browser, and there were zero bookmarks, nor was
there anything in its Preferences to indicate why upon being launched
it immediately displays the web page for CenturyLink. I did find a
place to specify starting with a blank page, and now at least it
doesn't start at CenturyLink. Why that was its default web page still
bugs me.

The browser had a Help > About, which said that it was:

	Web 42.5
	WebKitGTK 2.38.6
	Gnome Web Developers

'OK, fine' I thought. 'Let's just nuke this thing and that's the end of
that.' From the command line I tried various apt and snap commands with
names like 'web,' 'webkit,' webkitgtk,' and various other
possibilities, none of which could find the application.

Then I tried Synaptic, where I searched on those names and more, but
found nothing installed that sounded like my mystery web browser. I
did, however, find libwebkitgtk-<version>, including a couple that were
installed, but none of the version numbers looked remotely like
'2.38.6,' so I left them alone.

Web searches for 'webkitgtk' produced a lot of information that was
useless, because apparently 'webkitgtk' is part of too many things,
none of which look like my unknown browser.

For my next adventure I launched the browser and then opened Task
Manager GUI, which listed:

	Web
	WebKitNetworkProcess 1 11
	WebKitWebProcess 19 33
	WebKitWebProcess 27 33

I assume those are the mystery web browser, but I didn't kill them to
verify that they really were. I was looking for the name of the
program, which I already knew wasn't 'web,' so Task Manager didn't
help. I would have tried top from the command line, but I can never
remember how to run it so things stay put instead of leaping about.

Finally, I searched for a command to find the name of a running
program, and got a list of commands that will work beautifully if you
know the name of the program. Once again the net is great for learning
things that you already know.

So here I sit with a working menu entry that apparently installed
itself without a .desktop file, and for a program that was never
actually installed. That sounds impossible, but nevertheless I'm
staring at it.

I could use some suggestions. :)





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