1415101 - Add search engine

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 648398

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Martijn]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0
Build ID: 20171102181127

Steps to reproduce:

Trying to add a search engine in Options->Search


Actual results:

I cannot add a search engine there. The only way to get one added there, is magic. I can only remove a search engine, but once removed, it seems gone forever, because there's no way to add it back.


Expected results:

I should be able to add a search engine. Simply by typing in a name, a keyword, and a url pattern.

Alternatively, right-click on any search field in a web page, and click an option "Add search from here" or similar, that would add that particular field as a search engine. Opera used to have this functionality, and there is an XPCOM-based addon that does it too.

Comment 1

[Andre Klapper]

There is a "Find more search engines" link provided. 
You already should be able to add a search engine by writing an add-on for your search engine.

Comment 2

[Martijn]

The link leads to a page that says "No add-ons found": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/search/?atype=4
When I then search for something, I get all types of addons - not just search egnines. On top of that, there's no way to filter results by search engine. Only themes and extensions.

But none of that is even relevant.

Adding a search engine by writing an addon? Are you serious? Who would do that?? That's way too much to ask of any user. A search is nothing more than { keyword, title, url }.

Example: { keyword: "g", title: "Google", url: "https://google.com?q=%s" }

That's literally all that's needed. It could be as dead-simple as a dialog with three text fields.

Why can't we have a UI to add one?

Comment 3

[Pascal Seitz]

This is actually possible in an not obvious way by right clicking on the the search field in a website:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar

Comment 4

[Martijn]

That's completely fine, until it decides to add a bookmark?? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Why would a search engine need to be a bookmark? Removing the bookmark will remove the "search engine", which again, makes absolutely no sense. A bookmark is not a search engine.

Whatever the case, this hasn't solved the problem at hand: adding a search engine manually. In the preferences, you can delete a search engine, but there is no way to add one. A bookmarked one will also not appear in the preferences.

Seems like it's a magical list of arbitrary search engines atm. You can choose to delete one, but when you do, it will never ever return.

Comment 5

[Martijn]

I stand by my original comment. Add one manually onvolves nothing more than filling out three fields: title, keyword, and url.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I think this is pretty much covered by 648398, then there would be some kind of UI to add searches