IT House news on January 17 that with the release of the Chrome 97 browser, engineers on the Chromium team have removed the option to remove the default search engine in the browser. This change affects all Chromium-based browsers.
▼ Before Chrome 97, all five default search engines could be removed
▼ In Chrome 97, the 5 default search engines cannot be deleted
The change was submitted by Google employee Justin Donnolley:
Previously, users only needed 2 clicks to remove pre-installed default search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, Baidu). Doing so is irreversible and destructive because even if the user has enough knowledge to recreate the search engine using the Add dialog box, they cannot set suggestions, new tabs, or other private URLs.
However, this change has triggered criticism from many netizens, who obviously want to control the search engine autonomously, rather than being officially regulated.
IT House learned that shortly after, Donnelley responded below the post, promising to remove the change:
I apologize for the trouble you may have. We're looking at whether we can do something to address the underlying problem that people don't want to change their default search engine. But in the meantime, I'll restore the delete option in the UI. It should be returned in Chrome 98 or 99 (released in early February and early March, respectively).