356128 - Add option to disable search engine autodiscovery notification (search bar glow)

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Ihar 'Philips' Filipau]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061003 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061003 Firefox/2.0

New feature of upcoming Ff2.0 is search engine management and option for web pages to provide plugs for such search engines.

Presence of site specific search engine in standard theme is indicated by "glowing" up search engine selection button.

The problem is that "glowing" effect isn't optional and to turn it off I have to add the engine, what messes up my search engine list.

Scenario: I want to have 2 engines only so that switching would be very fast. But now I have to have 8 so that there would be no glow on sites I have to work with every day. This of course messes up my search engines by useless to me bloat.

That's not the same as SSL indication - which is active only when I work with SSL protected site (and that's rather important bit). RSS indication is also not that annoying, since it is normally available only for particular pages with news lines only.

The search engines are normally available for whole site - what means that the button glows on every page I visit, what is redundant and needless to say very irritating.

In other words I want to have and option to turn that glow off. I still might want to add engine from a site - but I do not need to told every time that I can do that.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. go to www.theregister.co.uk - it glows
2. open any article - it still glows
3. open any other article - it glows again
4. open en.wikipedia.org - it glows no mater what
5. open any article - it glows regardless
Actual Results:  
Search engine selection button glows every time.

Expected Results:  
Search engine selection button doesn't glow at all.

Also as I noted in comment to other bug, mix of blue and gray used for glow is really bad color combination. (I might opine also that Home Page button color in new theme is also stands out too much: brown + gray also mix poorly. I had to remove from toolbar so that it wouldn't irritate my eyes. Previous white icon was fitting gray interface better.)

P.S. Only workaround I know is to install Google Toolbar and replace standard Ff search with Google's one. But that's again degradation of functionality.

Comment 1

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

You can get around this with the following CSS in userChrome.css (for Windows):

.searchbar-engine-button[addengines="true"] .searchbar-engine-button-top {
  -moz-image-region: rect(0px, 32px, 10px, 0px) !important;
}

.searchbar-engine-button[addengines="true"] .searchbar-engine-button-mid-top,
.searchbar-engine-button[addengines="true"] .searchbar-engine-button-mid-bottom {
  background-position: 0% 0% !important;
}

.searchbar-engine-button[addengines="true"] .searchbar-engine-button-bottom {
  -moz-image-region: rect(12px, 32px, 22px, 0px) !important;
}

Comment 2

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

I don't think we're going to make this optional.

Comment 3

[Ihar 'Philips' Filipau]

> I don't think we're going to make this optional.

That's sad. Hardly anybody likes to have a GUI element on screen which all (most of) the time tries to attract attention a la "Click Me!", even though user does not need/want promoted feature. Nevermind.

P.S. Thanks for the hack. I'll try it.

Comment 4

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

Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the idea - I can see that it might be annoying in some cases. The problem is that providing options to disable entirely or disable per-site starts getting complicated for something that should "just work". I doubt we'll fix this exactly as summarized, if at all, but I don't mind keeping the bug open for discussion.

Comment 5

[Jackie Liu]

Personally, I don't find it that irritating and it does really make a feature that should "just work" more complicated (as said by Gavin).  This is just my opinion, of course.  If such a feature were to be added, perhaps a check box in the "Manage Search Engines..." dialog labelled something along the lines of "Enable Search Engine Autodiscovery" or "Notify me when a new search engine is available".  Just a suggestion.

Comment 6

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

Confirming this as a feature request, even though it may ultimately end up as a WONTFIX based on the conversation so far. I've yet to notice this feature unless I was looking for it though, so maybe it's more distracting to others than it is to me.

Comment 7

[Aubrey Alexander]

What about a way to "ignore" a given site.  So once I turn down a suggested search tool, I don't get prompted for that search tool again.

Comment 8

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

There is a solution in bug 482229 which will remove the autodiscovery option and the glow.

Comment 9

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

This isn't a duplicate of that bug. We're not going to be providing an option, we're just going to remove the notification entirely. We can resolve this one when bug 482229 lands.

Comment 10

[Rob Campbell [:rc] (:robcee)]

alternatively, could we disable the glow if a user already has a search engine installed? that should be a relatively quick fix and one that I think most users would agree with.

Comment 11

[Maniac Vlad Florin (:vladmaniac)]

I see search engines autodiscovery feature is disabled on the trunk FF4 beta 7 builds, 
try the latest 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0b7pre) Gecko/20100928 Firefox/4.0b7pre

Do we want this?

Comment 12

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

The feature has been disabled by the landing of bug 430627. Gavin, closing as invalid?

Comment 13

[Maniac Vlad Florin (:vladmaniac)]

Thanks Henrik for your fast response. This was quite confusing for some times and could not found any dev plan on wiki to study this myself.

Comment 14

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

yeah, invalid