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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

This is annoying, yes.

Changing the default search engine to yahoo every time there's an update is equally annoying.

Firefox doesn't do this. Third party software on your system (look at downlaoders, anti-virus apps, etc.) is doing this to Firefox. Firefox's search default is Google and if it's changed by you you'll know it and if it's changed by an extension you installed it'll say so in the Search preferences. I may be able to tell you which piece of malware on your system did this to Firefox if you'll do a search for something and paste the address here so I can look at the search address parameters.

Firefox did change default search engine to yahoo at some point, IIRC it was around the time yahoo was trying to sell itself at the best possible price.

I remember having to go through a dozen clients to fix their custom settings for search engines that had been switched to yahoo and eventually migrating some of them from firefox to waterfox.

Any chance you are using Linux Mint?

Did you originally install Firefox through a Yahoo ad? Yahoo used to run ads for Firefox keywords to get you to download their version of the browser. The ads looked like search results, so it was easy to visit the wrong download page.

No, I'm certain I did not.

As an aside, wouldn't that mean I'd be running a Yahoo-ized version of Firefox?

I don't know, but I haven't seen the search change to Yahoo on my computer, except when I briefly tried Linux Mint many years ago. Mint had set Firefox and Chromium to Yahoo and made it extremely difficult to remove. It was both browsers, so I'm assuming that it was Mint that did it and not Mozilla.

Would you mind pasting your `about:support` somewhere (github gist, pastebin, etc) and linking it here?

Me? I'm not having trouble with Firefox. The Yahoo problem with Linux Mint was many years ago. My search engines in Firefox haven't switched on me since I uninstalled Mint.

Ah, missed that. Cool.

Interesting, I have StartPage set as my default search engine, and it persists between updates.

My search engine remained Google on Windows upgrading Firefox 64-bit 62.0 to 62.0.2.

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