Google restores the ability to remove default search engines in Chrome 99

Google removed the ability to remove default search engines in Chromium recently and integrated the change in Chrome 97, which it released in January 2022.

All web browsers come with a set of search engines, called default search engines, that users can start using right away. Google’s Chrome browser comes with Google as the default search engine, but also a handful of other search engines, including Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo.

The web browser supports other search engines, and Chrome users can simply visit the sites of most search engines to add them to Chrome. Search engines can also be manually added to Chrome’s list of supported engines. Custom search engines can be configured by loading chrome://settings/searchEngines in the browser.

Chrome 97 introduced a change that prevented the removal of default search engines in Chrome. Chrome users could no longer remove them, while all other search engines could be removed as before.

Google reasoned that preventing the removal of default search engines was in the best interest of users, since it was easy to remove them but not so easy to restore them, if the removal was done by mistake.

Starting with Chrome 99, Google reintroduced the ability to remove default search engines in Chrome. Chrome users can reselect the menu icon next to the search engine they want to remove to bring up the context menu with the option to remove.

Selecting the remove option removes the search engine immediately. The default search engine cannot be removed, but it’s easy enough to make any search engine the default to get rid of all others.

You can make Matter Geek (http://www.ghacks.net/?s=%s) the default search engine in Chrome to remove Google, Bing, and all other search engines that are listed under Default Engines. Naturally, this works with any other search engine that is listed on the search engine management page in the browser.

closing words

Google listened to the community and reinstated the removed feature. Removing default search engines might seem like a cosmetic change at first glance, as it’s quite easy to make another search engine the default in Chrome. On the other hand, some users may want the freedom to remove any search engine from their browser, regardless of whether it is the default or not.

Now you: Do you remove the default search engines from your browsers?

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