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?

61

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

I am confused by this post, there are 4 ways to add search engines to Firefox:

  1. From the settings page via "add search engine" button, to pick on from the Firefox add-ons site. This is the "main" route for most users as it ensures you're adding links from a trusted source (so you won't add a fake version of a popular search engine by accident that scrapes your data).

  2. Via the address bar. Any website that supports OpenSearch can be added by right clicking the address bar and selecting "add search engine name".

  3. Via the Mycroft project website, where almost any search engine in the directory can be added to Firefox.

  4. Via bookmarks and keywords. This is slightly more involved but almost any engine can be added this way.

Android Firefox offers slightly different routes but again any search engine can be added. It is a bit more involved though.

Firefox includes certain search engines by default as it gets revenue from the search engine providers for doing so, and Mozilla is transparent about this. Although Mozilla is independent, the Google search engine deal remains one of its biggest sources of income. That's how it survives.

The default add-ons site meanwhile is a compromise between security and convenience for the majority of users, but people are not locked in to it and other search providers are not locked out of it.

The Mullvad browser is modified Firefox btw, as is the Tor Browser it is itself based off. I don't know how much either contribute to the Mozilla foundation. Tor is an open source project but Mullvad is a commercial enterprise.

One thing that is difficult to do though is adding a custom search engine query that is not already offered in the OpenSearch XML format. For example, how would you go about making https://lemmy.world/search?type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll&q=%s the default search engine pattern?

When I tried to do something similar I ended up creating and serving the XML from my own web server. Would love to know if there is an easier way. It used to be trivial to do via preferences.

Edit, sorry, Lemmy insists on turning ampersands into & for some reason, here it is the example URL pattern as a link

Also, this support post has some discussion on the issue.

And why the hell would I use an add-on for a web address? My point is that the search engine feature is gone from settings