225717 - search toolbar does not alphabetically sort search engine drop-down list until browser exits

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031113 Firebird/0.7+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031113 Firebird/0.7+

When a user adds new search engines to the CTRL+K search toolbar, the drop-down
list of search engines is not alphabetically sorted until the user exits and
restarts the browser. This is annoying.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. From the search toolbar drop-down list, select "Add engines..."
2. Add a couple new search engines
3. Look at the search toolbar drop-down list again.

Actual Results:  
The new search engines are appended to the end of the drop-down list. If you
exit and restart the browser, the drop-down list will then be alphetically sorted.

Expected Results:  
The drop-down list should always alphabetically sort the search engine list.

Comment 1

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Confirming with 2003-10-18 build on WinXP.

Comment 2

[Justin Watt]

I do not confirm this behavior in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0;
en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

The search plugin list remains in the order that they were added after restart.

Comment 3

[Ryan Polk (Quark)]

*** Bug 246907 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Sean Hayward]

*** Bug 274248 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Sean Hayward]

Re:#2 No sorting here either, 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041209
Firefox/1.0+

Comment 6

[Ivan Todoroski]

This behaviour of unsorted search plugins is really annoying, please make the
search engines sorted by their filename (to allow the user to reorder them at
will by adding numeric prefixes to .src files), or by their name, whichever is
easier.

It seems that Firefox generates the search engine list in the order it gets the
*.src files from the filesystem, so atleast on Windows, you can order them by
moving all of them out of the "searchplugins" directory, and moving them back in
in the order you want, as FAT/NTFS seem to preserve the order of entries in a
directory.

This of course won't work on some of the more advanced Unix filesystems, because
they internaly reorder entries using B+ trees etc. for better performance.

Comment 7

[Joachim Noreiko]

On OS X, the searchplugins are listed in alphabetical order when I launch Firefox.
On Windows 2000, they appear to be in a totally random order.

I think there are two bugs here and one fix -- sort the plugins on browser
launch, and insert new plugins in the appropriate place on install.

...but see Bug 255545.

Comment 8

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

This should probably just be duped to bug 255545 - custom reordering will be allowed, making this bug irrelevant.

Comment 9

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Marking this INVALID in light of bug 255545. Issues with the new search UI should be filed as separate bugs.