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 o… (了解更多)
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?