Best way of getting rid of Firefox search engines?

Which one is better?

Removing them from the search engines list via 'manage search engines' options?

Or completely deleting the search engine plug-ins (may be copying them to a different folder, locked down) from the searchplugins folder in Mozilla installation location? Will this affect Firefox? More precisely, has anyone tested it or used FF this way without problems?

Thanks

 

The latter. You'll still have the search engines you've added yourself; they're in a different location, your user profile.

 

I've added and deleted search plugins from C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins without any problems. You can put them in another folder for safe keeping in case you ever want them again. Same thing can usually be done with themes and add-ons.