How to get rid of Firefox search helper

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1

Firefox 128.9 which is included in Leap 15.6 has a “search helper” extension which I can’t for the life of me see how to remove. Would someone who knows please help?

This feature takes up a lot of screen real estate and I absolutely don’t need it, however it’s not listed in my installed extensions, and there’s only one anyway.

This website explains a bit more about it in a MS Windows context: [https://www.howtogeek.com/19393/remove-the-search-helper-extension-from-firefox/] and it’s apparently in a “Search Enhancement Pack”.

2

Firefoy is delivered without any extensions preinstalled on openSUSE. So it is not completely clear what you mean. Do you maybe mean the “search suggestions”? They can be disabled in Firefox settings. Settings->Search

If you can’t describe it, a screenshot may help.

3

Thanks for your response…

The first screenshot (Screenshot_20250411_140132.png) shows the normal “search-helper” window, which is located immediately under the usual URL & search toolbar.

Screenshot_20250411_140132
Screenshot_20250411_1401322256×1452 149 KB

The second Screenshot_20250411_140444.png) shows the same screen after clicking on the 4-squares icon to the right of the search-helper toolbar

Screenshot_20250411_140444
Screenshot_20250411_1404442256×1504 383 KB

Judging by the reference included in my head posting, I’m not the only one who doesn’t want this feature, especially on the small screen area offered by a laptop…

4

You seems to be confused. This is NOT related to firefox or any extension. The “4 squares” are part of the website and not a search helper toolbar. This is completely unrelated to any browser.

The “4 squares” are a main part of many opnSUSE websites as can be seen at many other examples. E.g. openSUSE documentation (screenshot with Google Chrome):

Bildschirmfoto_20250411_063401
Bildschirmfoto_20250411_0634011120×1206 68.5 KB

5

I beg your pardon, you’re right, I must have misinterpreted that link!

In my defence I should say this upgrade from Leap 15.5 to 15.6 has been a very long haul indeed, and I’ll never try configuring the BtrFS filesystem for /home again; I’m now back to a separate XFS partition with plenty of space. Maybe I need a long walk in the sun.

Thanks again…

6

To add to the @hui’s reply - the default home page is set in the file /usr/lib64/firefox/distribution/distribution.ini by the MozillaFirefox-branding-openSUSE package.

7

Hmm. Well, it wouldn’t matter if that file really was there, because the user can define whatever Home page they want in FF Settings, which is stored in the user’s home sub-dir (config for FF) … anyway:

user@machine:/usr/lib64/firefox> ls -al  ./distribution/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  20 Mar 31 10:05 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 656 Apr  5 11:11 ..
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root   0 Mar 31 10:05 extensions

user@machine:/usr/lib64/firefox> find . -name "*.ini" -ls
  610208      4 -rw-r--r--   1 root     root          699 Mar 31 10:05 ./application.ini
  610246      4 -rw-r--r--   1 root     root          166 Mar 31 10:05 ./platform.ini

user@machine:/usr/lib64/firefox>
8

Yes, thanks for both your replies, and I just discovered this for myself a few minutes ago after I noticed FF always started at the OpenSuSE webpage, even when it was shut down with no open tabs.