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Comment by ImprovedSilence | Hacker News Reader

Really? Is there no way around that? Ie just change your browser search settings? I was looking to try out mint, cuz Ubuntu is leaving something to be desired these days.

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It's just a simple package that's installed with Firefox. The parent is just making it seem like a huge deal, but it's trivial to remove the package and/or change your default search provider.

I did not find it trivial to remove the package, and changing my default provider didn't work for whatever reason.

Sounds annoying. Did you try through the firefox (registry) - about:config? Failing that you could try something like Firefox Nightly.

I eventually got it, but I did end up doing the registry and mucking out some bits in /etc. Then I figured, "hey, I haven't tried Debian yet." So that's probably my next step... but it's looking like if you want it done right you're going to have to compile it yourself :/

I tried Mint for the same reason, and this search default really soured me on it. I didn't find it easy to remove, either. Just wanted to warn others.

I found it about ten times easier than changing the default search in IE. Clicking the Search engine icon in FF and then clicking "Get More Search Engines" takes you to: http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php#siteinfo-legal

From there you just have to click the icon of the one you want. They should put them at the top of that page and not the bottom though (I added the anchor to the bottom of the page).

Fair enough, but I had an edge case where I wanted to use Pentadactyl, and it kept using the branded search as default no matter how I tried to tweak the settings. I eventually got rid of it, but it was infuriating for me that there was no simple way to hit, "I don't want this," and have it removed totally.

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