1661664 - Support Icon in custom search engines

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Gakki]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:82.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/82.0

Steps to reproduce:

It's nice to see that firefox already supported custom search engines. (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1106626 )

But, if firefox could set Icon for every engine, it will be better.

Just like this extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-custom-search-engine/ )

Actual results:

Default icon for all search engines

Expected results:

we can set the icon for earch engine

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)]

I think we should just use an appropriate favicon that Firefox knows of for the site. I don't think we need the capability to manually change/set it, since generally that would be complicated for most users and unnecessary in a lot of cases.

From a technical perspective, we should be able to use nsIFavIconService.getFaviconURLForPage, we probably also want to check that if it is the default favicon then we fallback to the search engine default favicon.

Comment 3

[Richard Beckmann]

I stumbled across this issue when I wanted to add custom search engines in Firefox. I needed icons in my custom search engines and expected this to be support by default. I tried the custom search engine dialog in Firefox, enabled by setting browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh to true in about:config. I had some instances where OpenSearch wasn't enough and custom search engines were required. E.g. adding WolframAlpha search. There is no OpenSearch support in WolframAlpha. Yet, WolframAlpha has a search bar for which math expressions can be inputted. There are other similar examples. Even today, custom search engines created in Firefox only have the default search icon.

I ended up not using the custom search engine dialog in Firefox. Instead, I found a site that does it at https://svelte.dev/repl/8b4c3b768f4041888bd64cbaffbb8135?version=4.1.1. This site does the same as the custom search engine dialog in Firefox with the addition of allowing to specify the URL of a favicon. That's exactly what I needed. It's also what I ended up using.

If the custom search engine dialog in Firefox would automatically deduce the favicon of a site or allow to manually specify the URL of a favicon then I would consider to switch back to it.

I learned a lot about custom search engines in Firefox by https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-search-engine-to-firefox#answer-1756774. It provided me the information to enable the custom search engine dialog in Firefox as well as the Add search engine site which I ended up using.