Recently I suddenly had intermittent trouble getting some https sites to work in Opera. The most consistently broken one was duckduckgo searches from the address bar. Since I always use that search engine, this was kind of a problem. Usually it would result in an error page saying that the page couldn't be reached. Occasionally the page would almost load but be incomplete.
In looking for a possible cause, I encountered a certificate in the list of certificates called do_not_trust_fiddlerroot
.
This certificate did not appear in any browser except Opera. I tried to look into what this was and found to my horror that it was apparently from a sneaky program called Fiddler that may install in cases where you didn't know it was on there, and would not show up in spybot or other malware searches. This program hides under many names and apparently intercepts ssl/https traffic.
I checked both browser settings as well as network settings, and I do not have any proxies set anywhere. I searched the registry for "fiddler" and found absolutely nothing. I checked the add/remove programs and found nothing in the list of names people said it might hide under (browsersafe, safeguard, browser safeguard) - nothing. In checking browser settings, too, I tried and could not find the Opera setting that used to put traffic through an Opera caching proxy to speed up web traffic.
As far as I could tell I had no extensions installed at all into Opera. I did, in the course of my troubleshooting, install the duckduckgo extension to Opera, hoping to be able to use duckduckgo somehow. I've migrated to Opera as my main browser after having had some unresolved problems with Firefox, so it was a real pain to have to use another browser to do duckduckgo searches or resort to using google directly. In any case, I have deleted the do_not_trust_fiddlerroot
certificate and it seems like, for now, duckduckgo is working in Opera.
My first question is where else should I look for this fiddler thing, so if it is on my computer I can get rid of it. My second question is whether other users have encountered issues using https to connect to duckduckgo using Opera, especially in the past few weeks, and what steps might have resolved this issue.
Opera 34.0.2036.50
Windows 10 64 bit