I downloaded a free one-hour trial of a mah jongg game from this site: http://zone.msn.com/en-us/home The install wizard asked me if I wanted to make Bing my default search engine and add some ridiculous Yahoo toolbar, and I clicked NO, cause you have to watch out for these things. However, it did it anyway, in a really sneaky way. When I enter search terms on the Firefox start page, it briefly diverts me here: http://start.msn.iplay.com/ Then it gives me Bing search results. I have deleted every program file associated with this game, and every possible cookie associated with it, but this still keeps happening. I went to the tech help desk at my university last night, and even those guys couldn't fix this! Does anyone out there have any ideas? I'd really appreciate it.

I realize, of course, that I can search Google or any other search engine instead of Bing from just about anywhere very easily. That's not my concern. It's the principle of the thing. I hate Microsoft, and I hate Bing, and I don't want them on my awesome open source browser!

Change the about:home search engine back to Google.

With the about:home homepage showing:
Firefox button > Web Developer -> Scratchpad -
copy and paste this script into Scratchpad > then hit Execute > Run

 
javascript:{localStorage["search-engine"]="{\"name\":\"Google\",\"searchUrl\":\"http://www.google.com/search?q=_searchTerms_&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a\"}";void(0);}
 

Thank you, thank you, thank you, the-edmeister, thank you! I am in your debt, sir!