1813696 - Enhancement: Add option to make tapping a search engine perform the search immediately

Status: NEW

(Fenix :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Jeff Boek [:boek]]

From github: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/22428.

What is the user problem or growth opportunity you want to see solved?

It's annoying to type out or paste a search query into the address bar, open the search engine list, select the desired non-default search engine, and then still have to tap Enter to perform the search.

There should be an option in Settings > Search to make the action of selecting a search engine from the list trigger the search immediately (if the address bar is populated) or to navigate to that search engine's home page (if the address bar is empty).

How do you know that this problem exists today? Why is this important?

As far as "problems" go, perhaps it's not a big one. The added step of tapping Enter to perform a search (or manually navigating to a search engine's homepage) might only add 0.5-1 seconds to the time required to perform a search. But Fenix is a browser, and users make millions of searches. Anything to make UX more intuitive and efficient is a worthwhile benefit (especially because I believe this enhancement would be fairly trivial to implement. I would be more than happy to fork Fenix and try to add it myself, although I could use some assistance in figuring out where to start, i.e. where in this enormous repo would I find the code that handles the search engine selection menu, where would I start for adding a checkbox option to the Search Settings).

Who will benefit from it?

Any and all Fenix users who use more than one search engine. As the app comes with multiple search engines installed, I would imagine this would functionally be approaching 100% of users.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

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