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donatello
Asked: 2012-08-12 23:40:15 +0800 CST

Ubuntu preinstalled laptop: How to change the default search engine and home page in Firefox?

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I have a new Dell Ubuntu pre-installed laptop. It came with 11.10 and I've just upgraded it to 12.04 (Precise).

Firefox has its homepage set to Yahoo search and the default search engine is Yahoo too. I want to change the home page and the default search engine. Every time I change this, the settings do not stick until the next time I start the browser again.

There don't seem to be any such settings that I can change in Edit->Preferences. (It does not stick until the next startup of the browser if I change the homepage in the Preferences/General tab).

12.04

3 Answers

  1. Change the Home Page to about:home in Edit -> Preferences -> General. If you want the home page to some other website, you can change it likewise.

    Firefox Preferences

    To change the default search engine, Type about:config in the URL bar in Firefox. Accept the warning.

    Change the value of browser.search.defaultenginename to Google. The capital letter on Google is important.

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  2. Best Answer

    I just found the fix. The Dell preinstalled Ubuntu comes with a package called yahoo-default-settings. This is a locally installed package and does not seem to be present in a repository (neither in Ubuntu official repository nor Dell partner repository).

    Just uninstall the package. Then, one can change the defaults and it sticks till the next start of the browser.

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  3. In my case package was named yahoo-browser-defaults, so I had to 

    sudo dpkg --remove yahoo-browser-defaults

    (inside this package there was /usr/share/xul-ext/ubufox/defaults/preferences/001yahoo-defaults-dell.js file and in general /usr/share/xul-ext/ubufox/defaults/preferences/ directory is the one to check in case of such problems)

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