1265508 - Attempt to add custom search engine (DuckDuckGo) has no effect in Thunderbird 45 OpenSearch

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1427317

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Erik Brangs]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0
Build ID: 20160407164938

Steps to reproduce:

I'm trying to add DuckDuckGo as a search engine option in Thunderbird 45 on Windows 7 64-bit. I'm using the instructions from https://duck.co/help/desktop/thunderbird which seem to be based on https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-search-engine-open-search . I'm using Thunderbird with German localization.


Actual results:

I tried all the steps from the instructions but they don't work: I can't choose DuckDuckGo as a search engine because it's not listed.


Expected results:

I would have expected the steps to add DuckDuckGo as a potential search engine. I'm pretty confident that the instructions are correct because I tried them on an Ubuntu 16.04 system with Thunderbird 38.6.0 and they worked on that system.

If something has changed in Thunderbird 45, I would have expected the documentation on Mozilla's website to be updated.

Comment 1

[Erik Brangs]

Thunderbird User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.0
Thunderbird Build ID: 20160407161913

Comment 2

[neomjp]

This is because of a change in Firefox 45. "Firefox 45 for developers" says.

"Starting in Firefox 45, search plugins located in the user's profile's searchplugins directory are no longer automatically loaded on startup. Instead, a list of user-installed plugins is maintained and only those plugins are loaded."
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/45#Search_plugins

So there is currently no UI to add custom search engines from a custom_search_engine.xml file. But a workaround for Firefox is given in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1236498#c7

In Thunderbird
1. Tools > Error Console (Ctrl+SHift+J)
2. Type in the "Code:" line:
Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/Services.jsm"); Services.search.addEngine("file:///path/to/your/custom_search_engine.xml", null, null, true);
3. Press "Evaluate"

Comment 3

[Erik Brangs]

Thank you. The workaround worked for me.

Comment 4

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

I believe the most-correct way to do it is to create an add-on like we did for Google: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/google-search-for-thunderbi/

Comment 5

[Erik Brangs]

I'm not sure about the best way to fix this. However, I think that the documentation in Mozilla Support and/or the release notes really should be updated to mention how it's supposed to work in Thunderbird 45.

Comment 6

[Steve Lee]

Can you not just add Duck Duck Go as one of the predefined search engines?

Comment 7

[©TriMoon™ Away from Bugmail unless has need to visit]

Thunderbird 60.3.1
What the hell is needed to remove the default search engines and add custom ones from an admin point of view?!

- The steps provided by neomjp above do NOT work for current version.
- The steps in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-search-engine-open-search do NOT work either !
- We do NOT want to use addons for simple things like search providers which are only simple xml files.

Comment 8

[Matt]

Mostly a duplicate of bug 1427317 but Bug 1427133 added DuckDuckGo and Google as default search engines.