318528 - Individual search engines are no longer remembered for multiple Search Bars

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[nrlz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

In Firefox 1.0.7 it used to be possible to add multiple search fields to the toolbars just by adding several <searchbar/> elements to the toolbars. Because the <searchbar/> element uses XUL bindings, it was not necessary to write any further plumbing code to get the search field to work.

Also, it was able to remember the individual search engines for each search field because the engine information was saved in a "currentEngine" attribute on the <searchbar/> element. This attribute was then persisted in the XUL localstore.

In Firefox 1.5, the searchbar code was changed and the "currentEngine" attribute no longer works.

From the changes inside "chrome://browser/content/search.xml", I think the changes were accidental.

LOCATION OF PROBLEM:
In Firefox 1.0.7, the initialize() method (inside "search.xml") first checks to see if an existing "currentEngine" attribute is set, before resorting to the search engine specified in the user preferences.:

     var engine = this.currentEngine;
     if (!engine)
        this.currentEngine = this.getDefaultEngine();

In Firefox 1.5, the _initialize() method gets the search engine from the preferences, then assigns it as an attribute on the searchbar element:

     var selectedEngineName = 
             this.prefService
                 .getComplexValue("browser.search.selectedEngine",
                                  this.nsIPrefLocalizedString).data;

    this.currentEngineName = selectedEngineName;

    if (!this.currentEngine)
       this.currentEngine = this.getDefaultEngine();


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Since Firefox only ships with one search bar, you will need to fake another search bar. Put the following in your "userChrome.css" file.:

#cut-button {
  -moz-binding: url("chrome://browser/content/search.xml#searchbar");
  list-style-image: inherit !important;
  -moz-image-region: auto !important;
}

What it does is it hijacks the "Cut" button and converts it into a search bar.

2. Go into Firefox customize mode and add the second search bar to the toolbars.
3. Set both search bars to different search engines (e.g., 1 Yahoo!, 1 Google).
4. Restart Firefox.
5. Look at toolbar...
Actual Results:  
In Firefox 1.0.7 the separate search engines are preserved.
In Firefox 1.5 both are set to the same search engine.

Expected Results:  
The separate search engines should be preserved.

Comment 1

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

This was never really fully supported, though I guess it doesn't surprise me that someone was making use of it :). Those changes were made to allow synchronization of the search dialog and search bar engines, though that part had to be backed out to work around a core crasher.

I have plans to rewrite this binding real soon now, so for the moment I don't think this is anything to worry about.

Comment 2

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

Multiple search bars currently aren't supported.