Fulan said

Hello, I still have Amazon, Bing, Chambers & co. in my extension list in about:support, even though i have disabled all of them in about:preferences#search. How can I purge them for good? Firefox 71.0 on Fedora 31.

Paste the underneath in the addressbar & enter

about:preferences#search

Scroll down to One-Click Search Engines & delete as required.

Hope it helps

Hi Fulan, the only way I've seen that hides those build-in search engine extensions is a Policy file.

This article describes how you create a Policy file: Customizing Firefox Using policies.json.

The contents of the policies.json file would be along the following lines:

{
  "policies": {
    "Extensions": {
      "Uninstall": [
        "amazondotcom@search.mozilla.org",
        "bing@search.mozilla.org",
        "ebay@search.mozilla.org",
        "twitter@search.mozilla.org",
        "wikipedia@search.mozilla.org"
      ]
    }
  }
}

As you can see, the list contains the search extension IDs you want to remove, separated by commas. (Writing them on separate lines is merely cosmetic.) I don't know the ID for Chambers, but you can find it on the Troubleshooting Information page.

It is not possible to remove these search engines. All builtin search engine are stored in a omni.ja archive file in the Firefox program folder.

• resource://search-extensions/

Chambers would be:

• chambers-en-GB@search.mozilla.org

jscher2000 said

Hi Fulan, the only way I've seen that hides those build-in search engine extensions is a Policy file.

Hello Jefferson :-) I've written what you suggest to /usr/lib64/firefox/distribution/policies.json, but it didn't change anything. Does it work for you?

Edit: about:policies says "The Enterprise Policies service is inactive."

Hi Fulan, since I run Windows, the file is in:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\distribution

The search extensions designated to be uninstalled are listed on the about:policies page (first screenshot) and are missing from the Troubleshooting Information page and the available one-click icons (second screenshot).

The uninstalled search engines still appear in the One-click box if I use the "Restore" button, but this doesn't make them usable (third screenshot). It probably is an artifact of their being separately listed in the search.json.mozlz4 file.

I'm quite sure the path was right, because there was already a "distribution" directory in it and because it's confirmed in this post on Reddit. It looks like I have the same issue with policies.json as the guy on Reddit, but I haven't found a solution for that.