But I very much doubt that microsoft pays google to have Bing as an option for default search in chrome. Google probably loses out when someone makes bing the default. But rather than restrict it they allow you to use bing if you want.

Also there is the fact that there is no way that wikipedia pays opera anything so if opera can have wikipedia as an option they should have kept bing. Or at least made it a lot easier to add bing ourselves without having to edit .json files or whatever else needs editing

May be they got payed/have contracts which search engine they implement. I dont really know.

... I don't like their reason for dropping bing though. Why not just add Duckduckgo and keep bing? ...

It's only a guess, but perhaps there's currently some kind of coding/programmatic limit on how many engines can occupy their default search-engine list? I do know that things like this, especially those which raise so many user complaints, aren't done by programmers just by whim in some kind of a vacuum...

I done what it said in the thread and got bing back.

I don't like their reason for dropping bing though. Why not just add Duckduckgo and keep bing?

In any case if I lose bing again next time opera updates I will have to uninstall as I don't see why anyone should have to jump through hoops to get their preferred search engine as default.

All other main browsers let you set bing as default. Even google chrome allows it so not sure why Opera sees fit to try and dictate what search I can use.

Looks like I wont be using Opera then. Shame as it's a good browser otherwise.

Thanks for replying though.