Ask.com removes other search engines from Firefox?

Solution 1:

i am not sure whether ask.com toolbar affects any other search engines or not but i can certainly tell you that there are many other possible side effects of that toolbar. you can take look at strange firefox bug

i would recommend reinstalling firefox without keeping any preferences for next install.

Solution 2:

Try this tip from the mozilla community documentation pages:

Restoring default search engines

Default search engines that come pre-installed in Firefox currently include Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com, Answers.com, Creative Commons, eBay, and in Firefox 3, Wikipedia. If you have removed any of the default search engines. you can restore them using the "Manage Search Engines "Restore Defaults" button. This will not remove any added search engines. (If the "Restore Defaults" button is disabled or "grayed-out", as shown above, that means that all of the default search engines are still available).

Another way you can restore the default set of search engines is to use the Firefox Safe Mode option, Restore default search engines. This will add back all of the default search engines if some of them are missing. This will not remove any added search engines.

You can invoke firefox in safe-mode from the command line:

firefox -safe-mode