Most web browsers generally have one or more default search engines, as do Chromium-based browsers such as Microsoft’s Edge or Google’s Chrome, to name a few. If users didn’t want the default search engine for some reason, they could have removed or deleted it from their browser settings earlier.
However, the recent Chromium 97 update modified these settings and the option to remove these default search engines no longer exists. Below is a before-and-after image comparison on Microsoft Edge, showing that the delete option has been removed, while the set default and edit options on Edge 97 remain.
As spotted by another Reddit user, lordcheeto, it looks like the Remove option was removed by Chromium because its developers felt it would be more beneficial for end-users to get rid of the Remove feature.
Chromium developer jdonnelly initiated the issue in an issue report with ID 1263679, writing:
Currently, you can delete a pre-populated search engine (eg Google, Bing, Baidu) with just 2 mouse clicks. Doing this is irreversibly destructive because even if you were knowledgeable enough to use the add dialog to recreate a pre-populated entry, you wouldn’t be able to set suggestions, new tab pages, or other specialized URLs. Deleting these should be relatively difficult (confirmation dialog) or impossible (no delete option in the menu at all). I am strongly inclined to do the latter.
However, while the change may be well-intentioned, some users are already complaining about new issues. For example, Filipa Nunes on the Chrome forums says that their default search automatically switches to Yahoo, even if they try to set it to something else. Many others on this thread said they faced similar issues. So it looks like the remove option in the Restrict default search engine settings may appear in Chromium 98 or 99 as a temporary fix for this issue.