Chrome won’t let users delete search engines
A recent update to the Chromium codebase has removed the option to delete prepopulated search engines in the latest versions of the Chrome and Edge browsers.
The problem was first highlighted several days ago when a number of users on a Google Chrome Help page and Reddit thread complained that they were unable to delete the search engines in either browser.
One user said their search engine kept changing to Yahoo in Chrome, despite having Google set as the default.
“I’ve tried to remove the search engines on Settings in chrome, but it doesn’t work since there is no delete button under the three dots,” the user said.
Google Chrome comes with specific prepopulated search engines based on the most popular option in each region.
In South Africa, it currently ships with Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia.
MyBroadband found that the delete option was unavailable for these search engines on one of our Windows 11 PCs running Chrome 97.
Soon after the complaints, Chromium developer Justin Donnely claimed responsibility for the issue.
“The motivation was simply that if someone deleted a search engine accidentally, there’s no way to get it back, so it’s a potentially very disruptive mistake,” he explained. “I wanted to protect against that even if very few people are affected by it.”
He said the option to delete prepopulated search engines would mean that certain users who weren’t knowledgeable could delete prepopulated search engines and be left unable to set the suggest, new tab page, or other specialised URLs.
However, Donnelly admitted he did not realise that users had deleted certain prepopulated search engines to avoid “search engine hijacking”.
It was evident from some responses that some applications, like McAfee, could automatically change the user’s browser to one of the populated options.
That is because McAfee’s Secure Search functionality only works with Yahoo. When this is turned on, the search engine automatically switches to Yahoo.
Donnelly said the Chromium team was looking into how they could prevent automatic changes to search engine choices and would bring back to delete option in the next update.
“It should return in either Chrome 98 or 99, releasing in early February and early March, respectively,” Donnelly said.
Now read: Microsoft rolls back controversial default browser setting on Windows 11
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