Deleting Search Engines From Firefox

Firefox is the browser to use, but it does have one thing I find irritating. It is difficult to find out how to remove search engines from the Search Engine Bar. I'm not interested in searching EBay or Creative Commons and I like to simplify my life by removing things I don't need or want. But I could not find a button or menu option to remove search engines.

That's because there isn't one.

Removing search engines is actually very easy, but it involves deleting the search plug ins for the search engines I don't use. This is how it's done:

Go to the folder where Mozilla Firefox is installed and then go to the "searchplugins" subfolder. In most cases you'll be looking a path that looks like this:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins

Then delete the search plug in files associated with the search engines you want to remove from the list. There will be two files for each search engine. A PNG image file and a SRC file. Delete both files. When you restart Firefox those search engines will be gone.