261124 - Textbox context menu should have "Add to Search Bar..."

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1650892

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Jesse Ruderman]

I should be able to add Feedster to the search bar from http://www.feedster.com/
by right-clicking the textbox and selecting "Add to Search Bar...".  This would
be more convinient than going to mycroft to install a search plugin.

"Add to Search Bar" would appear in the same situations that "Add a Keyword for
this Search" appears.  It would use the page's favicon as the icon in the search
bar, or some default icon if the page doesn't have an icon.

Comment 1

[choi9999]

(In reply to comment #0)
> I should be able to add Feedster to the search bar from http://www.feedster.com/
> by right-clicking the textbox and selecting "Add to Search Bar...".  This would
> be more convinient than going to mycroft to install a search plugin.
> 
> "Add to Search Bar" would appear in the same situations that "Add a Keyword for
> this Search" appears.  It would use the page's favicon as the icon in the search
> bar, or some default icon if the page doesn't have an icon.

Adding search plugins is not as simple as that.
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/contribute.html

Mozilla currently only supports plugins that work with the GET method. Also,
each search plugin has to go through a validation process to make sure it works
properly.

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 309862 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

"Keywords searches" and search engines will be one and the same, with the new search service.

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> "Keywords searches" and search engines will be one and the same, with the new
> search service.

That is the plan, anyways. I have a short amount of time left to get my search work completed, and "making the search service handle bookmark keywords" is lower priority than the management UI (bug 232272) and other search service bugs. That said, the actual "add to search bar" context menu option isn't very difficult to add (basically just need to call nsIBrowserSearchService::addEngineWithDetails).

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Attachment: wip

This adds an "Add to Search Bar..." context menu item. Needs better error handling (needs to deal with failure) and better UI (a dialog to pick the name?).

Comment 6

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Attachment: real wip

oops, wrong diff

Comment 7

[Mike Schroepfer]

Enchancement - linkrel will solve much of this so taking off the blocker list

Comment 8

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 344538 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 351089 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Malte Kraus]

some notes about the patch:
1) only "successful controls" should be submitted in a form (see http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#successful-controls). A check whether the form element has a name and is not disabled should be added.

2) IMO the first submit button in the form should be submitted as well. This is done when you press enter in a single line text box and I guess there are pages that depend on this behavior.

3) The name of an engine should be user-definable. Imagine you were on https://addons.mozilla.org/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/ and wanted to add the search to the search box. The titles "Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation" and "Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" are not what you'd like to have as the name of the search engine. "Firefox Add-ons" and "Wikipedia" would be much better. Asking the user (with the page's title as default) would be much better. If there were the option to use a custom icon for the engine in that dialog would be nice as well.

4) Line 3050 of browser.js (83 in the patch) is wrong. It should look like this:
addedEngine.addParam(el.name, el.options[j].value);

Comment 11

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Attachment: updated patch

Thanks for the comments, Malte. I've updated the patch to address them. However, this is far from being "finished". It has at least the following issues:

- Doesn't deal with trying to install an engine with the same name as a current engine
- Prompting for a name sucks, we should support renaming (bug 335102)
- If this is going to co-exist with "add a keyword for this search" (which is something else I'm not sure of), it should share the form-input getting code

Comment 12

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 233110 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

we were just discussing how awesome this would be if when adding a keyword search, the add bookmark/place dialog had a checkbox to add the search to the list of available search engines. When selected, adding the bookmark/place would also add the favicon from the site to the search engine. The newly created search engine should pull the name from the bookmark name to not bombard the user with another pointless dialog.

I think this behavior would be preferable to another menu item on text fields.

Comment 14

[heraldo]

Any progress on this one? Currently, users still have to browse through tons of search plug-ins at addons.mozilla.org and if they are lucky, they find what they are looking for. It would be much simpler to have "add search" in the context menu of a search field.

Comment 16

[bug.zilla]

"Add as search engine" is very useful on mobile.
Mycroft is great but not user friendly for everyone.

Could the functionality of the Add to Search Bar Add-On be added?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-to-search-bar/

Comment 19

[YUKI "Piro" Hiroshi]

I've opened the bug 1271945 to implement WebExtensions-based addon like the feature.

Comment 21

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

We are planning on allowing custom engines with keywords, and that will replace the bookmark keywords feature. The work for that is planned to happen in bug 1650892, so I'm going to forward dupe to there.