chromium in debian: hardcoded search engine, hardcoded home directory prefix

Firefox on Debian is unusable because it allocates memory until the computer grinds to a halt, no matter how much memory the machine has.

Chromium is better on memory, but has plenty of its own annoyances, which seem to be getting worse.

The search engine is hardcoded to DuckDuckGo.  There is no way to add multiple search engines as search engines.  You can add a site search with shortcut, so that you just have to type "g foo" to google, which isn't too bad.  You do this with Site search -> Add.  The form is really weird. But you can eventually enter Name as google, Shortcut as "g", and URL as "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s".

For changing the default, we are out of luck.  The help under "Search engines" says "You can also change your default search engine here".  But if I click on the pen hieroglyph, the URL of duckduckgo is greyed-out and not editable.  The "Search engines" list has one item and can not be added to.

Someone also seems to have hardcoded the home directory to /home/$USERNAME.  This is wrong, but seems to be getting more common.  It's not hard: the proper way is to use getent(2) on "passwd" and look at the sixth field.  But you can also just look at the $HOME environment variable.  All operating systems have something like this.

My home directory is in "/tj", not "/home/tj".  I have been in several organisations with unix installations with home directories on NFS, and the paths were site-specific.

The bug is showing up in chromium in one of the most common operations: saving a file from one web site, perhaps an attachment in webmail (it gets put in Downloads by default), maybe doing something with it, and then uploading to another web site, perhaps again an attachment in webmail.  Much of the drudgery of admin consists of doing this.

It suggests to "check the spelling" of "/home/tj/Downloads".  Some devtard, probably at Google, has made an extremely basic mistake here.