344190 - allow context-menu searching (for selected text) using installed search engines

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 248173

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[tommyjb]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Build Identifier: 

Currently, when there is a text selection, the user can right-click and 'Search Web for <text>'.  This is very handy -- but why limit this to Google searching?

Very often I want to search Answers.com, or perhaps Wikipedia, with some on-screen text.  Right now I have their search engines installed, and so I can copy the text, focus the search bar, select the relevant engine, paste the text, and press [enter].

This is quite a lot of effort though.  How about allowing the user to invoke, via the context menu, any installed search engine with the selected text, as Opera does?  See attached screenshot.

Bonus points for allowing this to work when there is no selection as well, allowing the user to search for a right-clicked word.  For example, if the user right-clicks the on-screen word "burlesque", and the user has no text selection, offer options to search for the word "burlesque" with all installed search engines.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[tommyjb]

Attachment: opera

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Well, actually in 2.0 it's going to be "Search <whichever engine you have currently selected in the search box> for <text>" which is somewhat better mostly, but having the whole list of engines in the context menu has been wontfixed in favor of the Context Search extension (and several even more complex ones).

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 248173 ***