Any browser that uses the Chromium open source web browser as a base is going to lose the ability to remove search engines from the default list they include as part of the installation.
Whenever you install a new browser, it typically offers a list of search engines to choose between and set as the default. In the past, you could delete any and all of these included engines. As Ghacks reports, a recent change to the Chromium browser has stopped them being deleted. This change impacts some of the most popular browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi.
A proposal to remove, or at least make it more difficult, to delete search engines from the list was made in October last year. The reason being it only took two clicks to achieve, which is viewed as “irrecoverably destructive because, even if you’re knowledgeable enough to use the Add dialog to recreate a pre-populated entry, you can’t set the suggest, new tab page, or other specialized URLs.”
Although a choice of making it more difficult or making it impossible was presented, it seems the Chromium developers selected making it impossible. Others in the proposal thread pointed out removing deletion would “fix more problems than it would create.”
For users, it simply means the list can only get longer, but then it’s unlikely you’ll ever visit it more than that one time when you’re setting up a new browser. Firefox users need not worry, of course, because Mozilla’s browser doesn’t use Chromium and therefore isn’t impacted by this change. Firefox offers two options in fact: delete search engines from the list or simply hide them from view.
