1649972 - Unable to add search plugins from the Mycroft Project

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[aragilar]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

Navigated to https://mycroftproject.com/ and tried to add some of the search plugins that the project provides.

Actual results:

The search plugins are not added to Firefox.

Expected results:

The search plugins would appear in Firefox's search engines.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

The API that MyCroft project is currently using has been deprecated as it has only been used by Firefox over the last few years and was marked as deprecated in the specifications: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/vSV-gg5621k/zOughoepBQAJ

The MyCroft project is already not working for Google Chrome which removed support several years ago.

As stated in the deprecation thread, the MyCroft project will need to adapt to use supported options:

For websites wanting to provide their own engines, the alternative is to
include the <link rel="search"> tag, or to provide their own add-ons
which add search engine providers.

We're sorry this has affected you, we needed to tidy this up for various reasons, and should have done several years ago.

Comment 3

[aragilar]

Ah, cool, I'm sympathetic to the need to remove legacy code.

Is there some way to take the OpenSearch xml downloaded from MyCroft and have it picked up by Firefox, such as copying the xml to specific paths (I started looking at MyCroft as the search engines provided by my OS disappeared, as noted in #1649971), or am I going to need to do something with web extensions?

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I've just looked at that bug and 78.0.1 should fix it for now. Although, you might be able to create a local html file with a link rel tag and include the search provider that way and then be able to install it.