Hi, as a technical note, those are not plugins, they are extensions.

The search engine extensions are built into Firefox and you can "remove" them from the Search Shortcuts box so they are out-of-sight, out-of-mind. However, there is no feature to permanently disable them.

Why do you want to disable them? Basically they define URLs for search and for suggestions, and don't do anything else. If you want to see what they look like, here is Bing as an example:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-release/source/browser/components/search/extensions/bing/

Hi jscher200, thanks for your reply and correcting my terminology.

Am I incorrectly assuming that the owners of these extensions will be collecting data from my browser and internet use as long as Firefox is running? I specificly don't use services by ggl, bing, amzn, etc, because of their invasiveness and disregard for privacy. Also I have suggestions turned off.

These extensions are written by Mozilla to define search engine URLs. It's a change in packaging from the old XML file format to the XPI extension file format. The sites do not collect data except when you send searches to those sites, which it sounds like will not be happening.

I believe these are search extensions. You can see the list of all extensions at about:debugging. These have very limited access (if at all) to your data, and I believe they do not send the data to their respective agencies.

I do not see how you can remove these, as even removing them from the search choices does not remove them.