I’m pretty satisfied with Linux Mint, for the most part. However, one thing does bug the hell out of me — their “branding”. Listen, if you want to make my desktop background a cute little Mint logo, fine. I don’t care. But when you start screwing with the Firefox search bar and sending me to some oddly-formatted, mint-filtered search page, something has to change.
Fortunately it’s not difficult. Just delete one file and edit a couple of others…
rm /etc/linuxmint/adjustments/15-mint*firefox*
vi /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/google.xml
vi /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml
In the two XML files, you’ll see the customizations that send you to the Mint customized page. When you finish, the tail end of the file should look like this:
<Url type=”text/html” method=”GET” template=”http://www.google.com/search/”>
<Param name=”q” value=”{searchTerms}”/>
<Param name=”ie” value=”utf-8″/>
<Param name=”sa” value=”Search”/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>
Kill and restart Firefox, and your search should be back to normal.