Why is my new tab search box defaulting to Yahoo?

[MiloShapiro]

Something hijacked my Firefox and set my home page to Yahoo.
I've reset the home page to what I want and reset my new tab to showing most used pages,
but at the top of that most-used-pages option there's a search box. For as long as I can
remember, that search has given me Google results. Now it is giving me Yahoo results.
Where can I tell Firefox that that page should default to Google?
Thanks! Using Firefox 53.0.3, btw.

[DanRaisch]

Left click at the left edge of that search box to display the list of search engines available and select "Manage Search Engines" at the bottom of that list. In the next dialogue select the search engines you want to have available and the one you want to be the default.

[MiloShapiro]

Didn't work quite that way, but you put me on the right path. Left clicking on the search box within that page does nothing no matter where I click in the box -- left edge or otherwise. But I discovered that, within the hijack, the search in the toolbar was also going to Yahoo. I left clicked on THAT one and that had a dropdown. I saw an option at the bottom of that dropdown that said "Change Search Settings" and the answer was in that. And changing that fixed the search to Google in both places. Resolved!

[therube]

To note: Yahoo search has been the default search engine now for a number of releases of FF.

If you had it changed to some other provider & its changing back to Yahoo, that's another issue.

[MiloShapiro]

That's exactly what happened. I've had it as google for years. I don't know if the reset happened because of downloading a video software (sometimes companies make deals like that) or if it was something that happened automatically in the upgrade to 53.0.3 ; can't be sure because they happened on the same day and I noticed after doing both. If upgrading to the latest Firefox does that, though, that's pretty sucky to undo my settings.

[DanRaisch]

If upgrading to the latest Firefox does that, though, that's pretty sucky to undo my settings.

And probably not a planned "undo" either or we would have seen reports of the switch from every user who updated to 53.0.3. More likely that, as sometimes happens, an update only borks some existing config settings for some users.

[the-edmeister]

Yahoo has been the default search engine since Firefox 34.0.5 and at that time [iirc] Mozilla made all the Search boxes in Firefox use the default search engine, unless that change came with Firefox 38.0 a little later when the Firefox 34.0 the "Search" changes that were made were refined a bit.

The URL bar, the Search bar, the default Homepage search box, and the New Tab page search box all use the default search engine which can be easily changed by the user. If it is switching to Yahoo from Google seemingly all by itself, you have something wrong with your Firefox installation.


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