Brave Search gets re-added every update, effectively resetting my preferred search engine in private windows

[jonahclarsen]

Description

I prefer using DuckDuckGo. But in private windows, Brave defaults to using Brave Search, even if it's not set as the default search engine. The only way around this that I've found is to completely delete Brave search from the list of available search engines in settings - then, the default search engine (DuckDuckGo in my case) gets used in private windows.

This would all be well and good, if Brave Search wasn't automatically re-added every single update. It's been very frustrating having the private browsing search engine randomly switch back to Brave Search a few times a month and having to go and delete it from the available search engines every time.

Edit: now that I'm looking for it, it actually seems much more frequent than every restart, possibly as often as every time I restart Brave.

Note I am on an M2 MBA running MacOS 13.2.1.

[diracdeltas]

cc @rebron this sounds like a bug

[levicki]

@diracdeltas @rebron Please see the #27434 — it is an undesirable behavior to re-add search engines explicitly removed by the user which needs to stop ASAP.

Brave doesn't respect our choice. If you need a way to re-add them for people who accidentally (how?) remove them, then please add a button titled "Restore Defaut Search Engines" instead of forcibly restoring them for everyone every time browser is updated.

And when I say forcibly I mean it — I went out of the way to create a database trigger to ignore table update, but even that doesn't stop Brave from re-adding the default engines because it probably does it through database export and import which nukes the trigger.

CREATE TRIGGER no_keywords_update BEFORE UPDATE ON keywords BEGIN SELECT RAISE(IGNORE); END;