I’m all for Mint Linux making some bucks via their Chrome and Firefox searchers, but not if it comes at the expense of basic usability. <quickie rant> If I were the Mint maintainers, I’d take a long look at whether it was desirable (let alone essential) that they hijack my CTRL-K functionality and replace standard Google results with their poorly formatted, functionality-impaired substitute.</quickie rant>

Anyhow, if you are here, you’re probably trying to figure out how to remove the Mint branded search from Firefox and/or Chrome. And I’m here to tell you how.

Remove Search Branding from Firefox

1. Click on the Google search icon in your title bar
2. Click “Manage Search Engines”
3. Click the link to “Get more search engines”
4. Choose a Google, any Google, from Mozilla’s choices. I chose Google SSL, which worked nicely.
5. After you install your Google SSL (or other version of Mozilla version of Google), click “Manage Search Engines” again, and move your new Google Search to the top of the list.
6. Voila!

Remove Search Branding from Chrome

There are probably an assortment of ways to accomplish this. I chose to Google “Chrome deb package” which led me to Google’s official distributions of Chrome, which can be found here. After following Google’s instructions to install my Chrome package, all was well (though that meant that I was running “Chrome” rather than “Chromium.” Whatevskis.)

Other than the annoying search stuff, so far Mint Linux seems to be an easy-to-setup iteration on the developer utopia that Ubuntu was built as, before it decided to go the way of the mandatory Unity.