Hi hawesome, is the problem with one of Firefox's built-in search engines being pinned with a blue search icon on the Firefox Home / new tab page?

I think a few of these new search shortcuts were sprinkled in to make users aware of the keyword search feature as an option. That can be hard to discover otherwise. You can remove the buttons if they don't add any value for you.

To block them from being added or re-added, you could try changing this preference (I can't test because I already removed them):

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste improve and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.topSiteSearchShortcuts preference to switch the value from true to false

How can I ensure that this (and all other possible promotions) will never happen again without changing the browser?

Hmm, no one can promise you that the page won't get new features in the future. On the contrary, as you've seen, it changes all the time. You could change to a different home page if that's not acceptable.

I should mention that there are other channels to advocate for changes in future versions of Firefox. You can use one or more of the following:

• Feedback: https://qsurvey.mozilla.com/s3/FirefoxInput/
• Discourse: https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/firefox-development
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/firefox
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Firefox

Thank you @jscher2000 for your thoughtful reply. I had my search engines list cleared with only one engine that I use selected. That's why it was weird to see that some new one (and obviously _promoted_) appeared on the Home page. Later I checked search engines list and found out that it had been _updated_ (my selected one stayed selected). Because by some magic flag to `automatically update search` engines was checked (I assume at least this is the case). Anyway, for now I have resolved this issue by manually removing Home page entry, clearing my search engines and disabling automatic updates for them. Thank you for your patience (another rant!) and understanding.