Firefox just made it way easier to search without AI or tracking

If you are tired of search engines like Google Search forcing AI overviews at the top of your screen or tracking your every click, Mozilla has some good news for you. With the Firefox 154 release, finding stuff on the web without dealing with AI fluff or privacy invasions just got a whole lot simpler. You no longer have to mess around with custom browser extensions or hidden settings just to get clean search results.

We recently covered how Firefox 154 brings dedicated AI controls and smarter tab management, but this search setting update might actually be the biggest quality-of-life improvement for privacy fans. Mozilla officially built Startpage right into the search options drop-down menu. That means you can set it as your default engine with just two clicks.

For anyone unfamiliar, Startpage is a privacy-focused search engine out of the Netherlands that delivers full web results without storing your queries or building a profile on you. Most importantly for a lot of people lately, it does not stuff AI-generated answers above actual search results.

The Starpage team even posted about the integration on X and shared a video that shows how to switch to Startpage from the address bar.

For years, Firefox users asked for Startpage.

A billion+ private searches a year. One of their most requested search engines.

Starting today, we’re built into Firefox across five European countries.

No extensions. No workarounds. pic.twitter.com/nRe9kiHWIE

— Startpage (@startpage) August 18, 2026

As Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox, noted, “So much of your web experience is prescribed before you ever open a browser. We’d rather you decide how you want to search.”

Plus, it looks like Mozilla’s decision didn’t come out of nowhere. In the announcement, they revealed that Firefox users were already running over a billion Startpage searches every year. But to do so, they had to jump through hoops to make it the default search engine.

In the blog post, they wrote that “when demand is this clear, our job is to remove the friction.” So Mozilla basically looked at what its community was doing and decided to make life easier for everyone.

Right now, the built-in option is available on desktop for users in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Mobile support for Android and iOS is scheduled to follow soon. Mozilla hasn’t explicitly promised a worldwide expansion yet, but considering the sheer demand, it probably won’t stay limited to Europe forever.

For reference, these are the default search options we see in India on Firefox:

That said, this is another move that shows Mozilla is actually listening to its users, at least in some cases.

Between this private search option, recent news that NVIDIA GeForce NOW is coming to Firefox for cloud gaming, and ongoing work on a true OLED dark theme, the browser is steadily getting better at focusing on what people actually ask for. If you live in one of the launch regions, all you need to do is update your browser, open search settings, and pick your default.

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