1106626 - Ability to add custom search engines by URL (non open-search and non-amo engines)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

It'd be nice to be able to add engines from their url, for engines that don't use opensearch, or that aren't available on amo. Chrome allows this in their search engine manager.

Comment 1

[Philip Chee]

Bug 261124 - Textbox context menu should have "Add to Search Bar..."
There is a (oldish) patch in that bug.

Also see: https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/add-to-search-bar/

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

Bug 261124 will allow adding search engines from textboxes, but not from URLs. About a third of my bookmark keywords have no corresponding <form>:

* Twitter search [all, not just 'top tweets']
* Twitter username
* Subreddit name
* Unicode codepoint
* DXR search with 'path:webidl'

I've also had to edit many of bookmarks manually, when the site moves from http to https or changes in a way that breaks my searches.

In bug 648398 comment 5, Philipp Sackl suggests this should be an addon, rather than part of the built-in UI for managing search engines. So maybe this is WONTFIX, but it's not quite a dup of bug 261124.

Comment 3

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

We should implement this by showing something similar to our RSS feed dialog when you navigate directly to a search XML.

IT should show information about the engine and have a button to add it.

Comment 4

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #3)
> [...]
> when you navigate directly to a search XML.

Which is a nice idea as a separate bug, but not really applicable here, because here you won't necessarily even have a search XML in the first place.

What's needed is something (a separate dialogue, or directly within the search engine list, or whatever) that lets you enter a title, a query URL with %s/%S, optionally a keyword and for bonus points even an icon and then creates a custom search engine based on that.

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

> What's needed is something (a separate dialogue, or directly within the search engine list, or whatever) that lets you enter a title, a query URL with %s/%S, optionally a keyword and for bonus points even an icon and then creates a custom search engine based on that.

We kind of already have that.

Any entry field that does a search can be added a search engine. Just long click on the entry field and you'll get an "add search engine" option.

Comment 6

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Which doesn't work for things that aren't available via search entry fields, though, since that dialogue doesn't offer any way of editing the resulting search URL. E.g. I have a search keyword for Bugzilla bugs that goes directly via show_bug.cgi=%s instead of buglist.cgi?quicksearch=%s and more importantly, some custom Wikipedia searches that prepend/append some words to my search query to save on typing when looking at certain types of articles that always start/end with the same words, i.e. similar to the things mentioned in comment 2.

At the moment this doesn't matter since the search created by that dialogue ends up as a keyword search "bookmark" anyway which I can edit manually, but if bug 648398 goes ahead that possibility would no longer be there, as the search engine manager currently doesn't offer any way of editing a search plugin's internal data, i.e. most importantly the query URL.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

when keywords will go away there will be a way to create and edit custom search engines.

Comment 8

[Gorjan Jovanovski]

Is this planned in the near future? Seem like a simple addition, so why not look into adding it?

I've had to mess with HTML on sites with the dev tools to add fake <form> tags in order to get the "Add to search bar" menu to popup.

Comment 9

[Zhenya]

Really miss the feature compared to Chrome.

Comment 11

[primexx]

Attachment: Chrome's add custom search prompt

This is Chrome's add search engine prompt that only requires the user to type in a query string and creates a custom search engine. Other Chromium based browsers also have the same prompt.

Comment 12

[primexx]

I echo this feature request.

Currently it is not possible to add custom search engines to Firefox without installing some kind of manifest file. Usually as an addon. This is extremely inconvenient since it limits options to only search engines that somebody else has pre-made and does not allow users to set custom search engines (default or otherwise).

Manually editing the search.json.mozlz4 is fraught with issues and is very unreliable, it's very difficult for a layperson to manually add it properly (often when I try it doesn't show up at all! I assume there's some integrity check somewhere or other that is reverting manual changes) or to make any future updates to it. This is simply not a workable general solution.

Chrome and Edge both have this functionality as a simple text prompt. It is basic and all we need. But one improvement over it would be to add a function to set custom favicons for each search engine.

This is distinct from bookmarks keyword URLs because a search engine ties into the browser UI whereas bookmarks keywords do not. This is especially prominent in the case of one-click searches, where browser recognized search engines can show up on the one-click search bar, but bookmarks keywords do not.

The feature should be addable without any fundamental changes to how Firefox manages search engines. It just needs an UI to create custom search engines by having the user supply a name and query string and optionally a favicon (the keyword does not need to be prompted at this point because the existing properties UI already lets you edit keywords for search engines) and then uses that data to generate a search engine (or update the search.json file?) that Firefox recognizes.

Comment 14

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Attachment: Bug 1106626 - Add ability for the user to define custom search engines

Comment 15

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/aa3aa3881ba4
Add ability for the user to define custom search engines r=preferences-reviewers,fluent-reviewers,jaws,Standard8

Comment 16

[Cristina Coroiu [:ccoroiu]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/aa3aa3881ba4

Comment 17

[Greg]

Can someone please explain how I can add a custom search engine to Firefox? I filed Bug 1336604, which said it is a duplicate of this bug here (1106626). This bug is now marked as fixed yet I can find no way to establish a custom URL search engine in Firefox.

I would like to set a URL Parameter (for example) "https://duckduckgo.com/?kn=1&q=%s" as my default search engine in firefox. I can do this easily on Google Chrome (hence why I use Google Chrome instead of Firefox).

How do I set this as my search engine on Firefox? This used to be easy to do in historic Firefox but you took the ability away, which is why I left Firefox. Has this ability been restored? If so, why can I not figure out how to create a custom engine?

Comment 18

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to Greg from comment #17)

Can someone please explain how I can add a custom search engine to Firefox? I filed Bug 1336604, which said it is a duplicate of this bug here (1106626). This bug is now marked as fixed yet I can find no way to establish a custom URL search engine in Firefox.

This functionality is not enabled by default as it is not ready yet. This was a project that was started a while ago but was delayed due to other priorities, we are hoping to get back to it soon, but not ETA yet.

I would like to set a URL Parameter (for example) "https://duckduckgo.com/?kn=1&q=%s" as my default search engine in firefox.

You can use OpenSearch based engines as an option. There may be one already defined that does what you want on https://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=duckduckgo

How do I set this as my search engine on Firefox? This used to be easy to do in historic Firefox but you took the ability away, which is why I left Firefox.

There has never been an ability to create a custom engine directly in Firefox. Other methods may have existed but they would not have been supported.