Chrome 99 Canary brings back the ability to remove the preset search engine option

Google quietly introduced a change in the earlier Chrome 97 release. As part of a revamp of the search engine settings page, the new version doesn’t even allow users to remove the default search engine provider option. But after sparking a public outcry, Google promised to restore the option in the browser settings UI. After a long wait, we finally saw the feature’s return in the Chrome 97 Canary branch.

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Friends who have recently updated to Chrome 97 may have noticed that Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia and other search engines present in the browser cannot be deleted by default. As shown in the figure above, after clicking the “Three-dot Vertical” menu icon, you can only see the two options of “Set as Default” and “Edit”. Before Google gave an official response, many users posted complaints on social media such as Reddit.

Another user reported on the Chrome Help Forum:

My search engine keeps getting changed to Yahoo!, even trying to remove the default option in the Chrome settings page, the ‘three dots’ menu key doesn’t see the option to delete. How can I fix this problem? I have tried resetting my settings, cleaning and retrieving my computer for any malware.

Google employee Justin Donnelly explained that this should just be a bug introduced in Chrome 97. This change is intended to avoid accidental removal of built-in search engine options, not to prevent search engine hijacking.

In another related Chrome bug report, it was also mentioned that “removing the default search engine is too easy”.

Some friends are using the removal as a solution to prevent unnecessary changes to the default search engine, so we should continue to support it for now. However, in order to avoid accidental deletion, Chrome will still display a confirmation dialog when people try to delete the preset search engine option in the future.

If you are already using the latest Chrome 99 Canary, you can try to enter chrome://settings/searchEngines in the multi-function address bar and jump directly, and then you will see the “Delete option” as shown above. Interestingly, this change also affects the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser.

Friends who are troubled by this, please wait patiently for the push of the new version. Finally, according to the plan, Google will push the official version of Chrome 98/99 in early February/March this year.

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