909715 - DuckDuckGo Plus remains the selected engine in the search bar after changing it with Google and restarting Firefox

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, defect)

Description

[Manuela Muntean [Away]]

Reproducible with the latest Beta - Firefox 24 beta 6 - build ID: 20130826142034
Reproducible with the latest Nightly - build ID: 20130826190748
Reproducible with the latest Aurora - build ID: 20130826004002
Reproducible with the latest Release - Firefox 23.0.1

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open Firefox and install DuckDuckGo Plus add-on from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search-tools/ You will see that this is now the selected search engine from the search bar
2. Change the search engine to be Google from the search bar
3. Restart Firefox
 
Expected results: after step 3, Google should be the selected engine in the search bar

Actual results: after step 3, DuckDuckGo Plus is the selected engine in the search bar

Notes: 

1. This issue isn't reproducible if I select Yahoo, Bing, etc. instead of Google
2. When investigating if this is a regression, I found out that this add-on is not available for Firefox 4 (I wasn't able to install it from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-for-firefox/ )

Comment 1

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

Looks to me like the add-on is being a bad little add-on. The addon description says it is going to take over the default search engine slot. If you remove the search engine in the search engine manager, then restart Fx, the duckduckgo search engine returns to the default slot.  disable/remove the add-on is the only way to stop it from taking over the default search engine spot.

Comment 2

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

The developers have been informed about this bug.

Comment 3

[marek]

I am the developer of that extension and I can tell you that it was not intended to be a bad little add-on.

The issue occurred on higher level (https://github.com/mozilla/example-search-addon/issues/1) and we are working on pushing the fix to the Addon Market.

Comment 4

[marek]

It seems that we really need more information here.

The fix provided by Kris only works after second restart for some reason. I have encountered a totally strange situation where both `Services.search.currentEngine.name` and `browser.search.defaultenginename` are set to Google and yet DuckDuckGo appears as the default search engine.

Is this problem a problem on the extension side? Are we doing something the way we should not? I was not able to find much documentation regarding this, is there some? Did I miss something?

Thanks!

Comment 5

[marek]

Are there any news on this? Can I be of any help? 

I tried to test this a bit more and here is what I found:

There are only two things set to DuckDuckGo when it is selected: browser.search.defaultenginename and browser.search.selectedEngine (note the different cases). Then when you select Google the browser.search.defaultenginename gets changed to Google and browser.search.selectedEngine is cleared.

Then when you restart the browser it is set back to DuckDuckGo. You repeat the procedure and it's set to Google as it should be.

For me (please correct me if I am wrong) this means that the underlying code does something I do not understand and unfortunately cannot control.