How Google handles cookies seems to be a complete mess.
In
Opera everything seems to work as it should. Safe search remains inactive and my language preferences are remembered.
In
Konqueror my settings were remembered after I specified that cookies from
www.google.com and
www.google.fi should be accepted. Strangely enough just ticking "Accept all cookies" was not enough. Interestingly Google's configuration page uses an older layout in Konqueror than in my other browsers.
My 32 bit version of
Chromium crashes immediately when I start entering anything in the address bar. (Being mainly an Opera user I was quite unaware of this until I stumbled upon this thread.) Nevertheless, in my 64 bit setup
Chromium does remember the Google settings. It appears to forget them, as the Safe search slider jumps back to the center, but the settings really used are the last ones I actually saved.
Firefox forgets everything. I did manage to change the language of Google's UI, but only by changing my preferred language for all pages Firefox displays, while my Google settings (including the filtering preferences) are forgotten the next time I use Google in Firefox - in spite of Firefox being set to accept all cookies.