WHY can I not remove the pre-loaded search engines?
I have no desire to interact with Google, Bing, or Perplexity, and as a rule I don't want outside parties (such as Firefox/Mozilla) deciding for me which search engines or other service providers I see advertising for. (And yes, seeing that "G" logo somewhere is advertising for Google.) I'm assuming that these companies are paying to be pre-loaded as search providers in Firefox, and I understand that Firefox needs this financial support if it's going to continue providing a browser.
After upgrading, I've always gone into the settings and removed these search providers - I don't want to see them offered as search options, and to be honest, I don't even want to see their names in the settings screens.
Now with Firefox 152, I find that I'm not able to delete these pre-loaded search providers anymore. I can turn off a switch to disable them, but there's no way to totally delete them from the list anymore. There's even a [in the documentation] which explicitly says that the pre-loaded search providers cannot be removed, only hidden.
'WHY can I not delete them?
Is there a technical reason, i.e. would the browser stop working if they were removed? Are some companies paying extra to not be delete-able, and it just happens that every one that's pre-loaded in Firefox 152 decided to pay the extra money? Or did Mozilla just make an arbitrary decision to reduce the level of control that users have over their own browsers?
All Replies (3)
Read this comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1t4ajl3/new_settings_redesign_please_bring_back_the/ok13r28/ and the one right below it. (Info from two Mozilla employees)
That doesn't really answer the heart of my question, which is WHY these search engines are not removable. All I can assume is that Mozilla has arbitrarily decided that users don't want/need/deserve the same level of control they had a few versions ago. Call it OCD if you like, but the fact remains ...
- I don't want google, amazon, bing, ebay, or anything other pages pre-loaded in MY browser at all - not as "favourites", not as search engines. I don't even want to see their logos.
- Before version 152, I was at least able to remove them, even if every new software update added them again. Irritating but tolerable.
- Now Firefox won't even let me do that.
Thanks, Mozilla, for forcing google down everybody's throat. Nice to see you're still focused on privacy.
John द्वारा सम्पादित
Because they come from remote settings, so are updated "over the air" constantly, based on regions, languages, changes in the search providers' URL structures, to be up to date and relevant to the approximate geography and locale for every user and their installation. (So the previous "hiding" was just cosmetic, fragile and eventually buggy and surprising for folks.)
Since the factory providers and user entries are carefully separated (so e.g. they won't clash when the same search eventually appears in both lists), the built in ones are simply not editable, because the factory list itself is just not editable (there's nowhere to store any edits, they are "over the air", read–only).
What you're asking for perhaps, is a preference to not ingest any factory search providers at all and only keep the user ones, however the lift on that is pretty big as the browser code–wise needs to have at least one/default search provider to not get super confused — so this is kinda hard to balance when you'd want no remote providers but have no custom ones yet.
You can either open a suggestion at connect.mozilla.org to propose the utility of any similar preference, or if you're willing to contribute patches that would handle any customizations of these read–only data, please file that in bugzilla.mozilla.org first for tracking.
(There might be an addon that internally constantly removes the internal ones, but keep in mind this mucks up the expected profile/storage integrity, so YMMV.)
The change in new settings is mostly for transparency. The entries still come from the remote settings as before, do not "go anywhere" exactly like before when disabled, just the affordance to bring them back in is now aligned with the rest of settings and the actual data logic: it's enabled/disabled, not "poof gone" vs. restore from upstream.
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