227946 - "Web Search for" and "Add engines" don't work

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[Greg L.]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031208 Firebird/0.5

Selecting any text on a web page and clicking on the context menu "Web search
for xxx" does not open results in a new window or tab. An error message appears
in the JS console after every click:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code:
0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIStringBundle.GetStringFromName]"  nsresult:
"0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)"  location: "JS frame :: XStringBundle ::
getString :: line 16"  data: no]

Steps to reproduce:
1. Open browser and load any page
2. select any text on the page, right click and select "Web search for xxxx"
expected:
- a new tab with a Google search is opened
actual:
- nothing happens, error message in JS console

Comment 1

[Greg L.]

Interestingly enough I just noticed that the same JS error message is produced
when I click on "Add engines..." in the quick search bar.

Comment 2

[Michael O.]

Discussion: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=39596

Deleting pluginreg.dat and registry.dat from the root of your profile should fix
the problem. Nobody's figured out what causes the breakage though, and this
should probably be investigated by someone with a debug build.

Comment 3

[Steffen Wilberg]

Adding "Add engines" to summary, since the same error is displayed in the js
console (see comment 1) and it's likely to be the same cause therefore.

Comment 4

[Steffen Wilberg]

The pref "browser.search.defaulturl", used by "Web Search for", and the pref
"searchEnginesURL", used by "Add engines", are stored in 
chrome://browser-region/locale/region.properties which can't be found.

That's a problem with your profile. I've had the same problem. Try creating a
new profile. This should work.
Now back up your old profile and start deleting files. I don't know what it was
that helped me, maybe the overlayinfo subfolder.

Marking as INVALID since this doesn't happen with a new profile.

Comment 5

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

Reopening since this is still being experienced (bug 254457). This doesn't seem
to actually have been fixed anywhere.

Comment 6

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

*** Bug 254457 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Ricardo Silva]

Well, I've been trying to fix this same problem here without luck ...
Middle-click works but not the "Search Web for..." from the context
menu!

But if I delete the profile and reinstall the browser it works sometimes... but
only sometimes ... and when it works, after a few weeks suddenly it stops
working for no aparent reason and I've got to reinstall all over!

Well, I've just found an extension that works around this problem by using the
searchbox plugins instead of just the Google Search...

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=75294

After installing this the bug is gone (sort of)

My current setup is Suse 9.1 Professional and I've also come across this exact
problem in Mandrake 10.1 (Cooker)

I hope this helps ...

Comment 8

[Marcos Silvano]

On Firefox 3.6.10 (Ubuntu 10.10) and Firefox 9 (WinXP) the bug doesn't occur anymore. When executing the steps defined by Greg, the behavior is as expected: a new tab with a Google search is opened. So, I think this bug is RESOLVED. Can anyone change its status, please?