Important Notice: We're experiencing email notification issues. If you've posted a question in the community forums recently, please check your profile manually for responses while we're working to fix this.

On Monday the 3rd of March, around 5pm UTC (9am PT) users may experience a brief period of downtime while one of our underlying services is under maintenance.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Since the last update, whenever I close and reopen Firefox, my default search engine changes back to Google. What's going on?

  • 1 reply
  • 2 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

Since the last update, whenever I close and reopen Firefox, my default search engine changes back to Google. I have to manually change it back to my preferred engine. Is anyone else having this problem, and if so, how can I permanently change my search provider, instead of having to manually change it again every time I start Firefox?

Since the last update, whenever I close and reopen Firefox, my default search engine changes back to Google. I have to manually change it back to my preferred engine. Is anyone else having this problem, and if so, how can I permanently change my search provider, instead of having to manually change it again every time I start Firefox?

All Replies (1)

more options

You can use the SearchReset extension to reset some preferences to the default values.

Note that the SearchReset extension only runs once and then uninstalls automatically, so it won't show on the "Firefox > Add-ons" page (about:addons).

If you do not keep changes after a restart or otherwise have problems with preferences, see:


Try to delete the search.json file and possible search-metadata.json and search.sqlite files in the Firefox profile folder to reset the search engines to the default.

Firefox will rebuild the search.json file from the default search engines in the "browser\searchplugins" folder in the Firefox program folder and the searchplugins folder in the Firefox profile folder.

You can use this button to go to the currently used Firefox profile folder: