It’s annoying as shit
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Never had this problem. I’m using Firefox on Windows and Android with another search engine for years now.
Never seen this. Do you have some kind of browser extension or malware?
I think I only have usual extensions, uBlock Origin etc.
Run a malware scan. This isn’t normal behavior as far as I’m aware.
Do you still have the Google search engine added? I always fully remove it, since Searx pulls from Google anyways, I don’t really see the point in keeping it.
There’s no reason not to leave it alone… though choosing a better default is advisable.
There are many times when SearX isn’t a good solution (though SearX or SearXNG are a great default)… Your answer is ‘popular’ because everyone hates Google. But also problematic, because it will lead to folks trying something else and then just going back to the best one.
You’re defeating your own aims.
Though you can punch through with DDG style bangs…
For this search, Duckduckgo is probably nicer. Adding - and not removing stuff from Firefox gives you the simple choice to use keywords:
Now see what happens if we try to get an ‘ebook’ copy of ‘The Hobbit’:
- ebook the hobbit a direct download link. Nice (because I added annas-archive with the keyword ‘ebook’).
So really, the trick is more to
- Break Google’s stronghold on your internet. Right now the internet is virtually owned by Google, Reddit, Meta.
- Find out why Google Search now has trouble giving you good results the way I remember it did ten years or more in the past.
- Be more flexible.
- Don’t forget that it’s also very easy to add ‘lml’ for ‘Lemmy.ml’ search (though it’s currently down, so I’ll try Lemmy.World instead: lw firefox
Nope, never happened to me in 10+ years of usage, except when completely reinstalling after wiping everything.
Only when I reinstall not update
Happened twice ~6 months ago, even though I’ve removed Google from search engines. After that it never happened again. It’s annoying but it happened only a couple times so it’s not a big deal for me
Interesting. I did a quick search and found these old threads: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/firefox-82-0-2-sets-search-engines-back-to-default/35847/16, https://forum.manjaro.org/t/firefox-keeps-resetting-search-engines-on-manjaro/49260/4. These people have a similar problem, also on manjaro. I don’t want to investigate any further tbh.
Happened to me recently after an update, but it hasn’t happened again so far
Not at all.
If an update causes me any problem, I can reboot to a snapshot (3 hourly, 3 daily, 1 weekly) and if it’s an issue with my Firefox profile folder, I would just copy back one of the rsync backups:
I have the benefit of experience, I loved my Nokia 3210, bought a Nokia 3310 - but managed to lose it a few years later… and was shocked because I had no record of contacts/phone numbers.
With Firefox, I learned that trying out a new version could ‘update’ the profile, and then reinstalling the old one wouldn’t work with that profile (I had to use sync to restore it). Since then, I always have a snapshot of the entire system, plus regular backups to defend against hardware failure.
Some people believe in Evolution, they think that the world would move forwards…
These days it’s so trivial that it’s hard to estimate the intelligence of anyone who doesn’t do it, and then complains that something went wrong.
I don’t ever recall this happening on an update. On a fresh install only.
