Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, or any other Chromium-based web browser natively provides an option to select a default search engine. And if it was until now possible to manually delete one or more of these unused search engines from the browser settings, it will soon no longer be possible to do so.
A Microsoft Edge user has complained on Reddit that the option to remove a default search engine has disappeared. Quickly, other users came forward and discovered that this change was not specific to Microsoft’s browser, but applied to all Chromium-based web browsers.
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Easy to remove but complex to restore search engines
By doing some research in the commit of Chromium (a page intended for the developers and gathering all the changes made on a software), they discovered that the developers of Chromium suggested this modification at the end of October 2021.
The reasons for this deletion seem quite laudable. Chromium developers believe that it is too easy to remove a default search engine while the procedure to go back is much more complex.
For them, the delete option should be more difficult to use, such as displaying a dialog box to confirm the deletion, or simply deleted to avoid users encountering difficulties in the event that they want to restore the engines of default search.
The decision to remove the option to remove default search engines in Chromium settings was then taken and applied to Chromium 97.
Therefore, all web browsers based on Chromium 97, which is the case for example for Chrome 97 or Edge 97, no longer allow removing default search engines in the settings.
And it didn’t take long to see the first returns ofdisgruntled users to no longer be able to remove search engines that they do not use in their browser.
Some even report that removing this option automatically changed their default search engine to Yahoo. To satisfy everyone, Chromium developers could restore the delete option in a future update, and potentially integrate a button to restore the list of search engines offered by default in the browser.
Source: Neowin