Since when did Firefox make it so difficult to set custom search engine?

squid@feddit.uk to Linux@lemmy.ml – 22 points –

So been moving around a lot with browsers, waterfox, librewolf and very recently degoogle chromium, figured id look at Firefox and holy theres less than half the option in setting then there were afew years back but I gotta say the biggest sin is that adding custom search engine is obfuscated, and the chooses of engines are google, bing, duckduckgo and fucking Amazon! Wtf is that about? But anyway all these search engines are pretty awful including duckduckgo but beyond that the browser scene is a joke, mullvad are about the only company I feel compatible with using now

Edit: instead of saying how easy it is to add custom search engines, I'd like to know why the "add search engine" feature in settings is gone?

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@squid True...Harder now to add a custom search engine unless you visit it and then click the url on top to get a dropdown to add it...but manually adding it is hard.

Speaking of search engines I highly recommend searx.neocities.org/ - it randomly uses the best Searx instances. No ads, no tracking...

I've heard of searx never used it though

@squid I use it daily. We ran an instance too. It is simply great. As good as Google, DDG, and the like are, since it is using them.

So its an agitator, will it directly communicate with googelz bing ddg? Or does it use an IP hiding techniques?

@squid

Searx does not share users' IP addresses or search history with the search engines from which it gathers results.

- read more here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx and see the source code here github.com/searxng/searxng

I'd love to try using it more. How do you add it to Firefox?

How about startpage?

@TheDarkBanana87 As far as I know they have been bought by an ad-company en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpag… - but SearX supports Startpage too. Just without the BS. I cannot trust any company honestly. They are incentivized to kinda lie and exaggerate. And search engines ran by companies....are terrible. If their business model is to sell you ads, they will track you one way or another, and if not today, they will do it next year.