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Cassandrich

OMG! TIL there's a way to add back the long-since-removed capability to add your own custom search engines to Firefox.

In about:config, add a new boolean key browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh = true.

Then the "Add" button is available in search preferences (put %s where the query term goes).

Source: superuser.com/questions/7327/h

Super UserHow to add a custom search engine to Firefox?Is there a way I can add a custom search URL to the Firefox search bar? e.g. I'd like to provide a URL such as https://blahblah.com?search=%s, where Firefox replaces the %s with the content of the ...

Add "Google Web" with URL of https : // www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s and enjoy deshittified Google while it lasts.

@dalias huh i didn't even know it was gone since i use nix to do it, hmm.

@dalias thanks for searching, I already gave up a while ago

@dalias you can do similar things with the bookmarks
It's not clear to me why there are 2 different but similar things 😅

@julienw AFAICT bookmarks cannot change what happens when you type a non url and press enter.

@dalias I haven't played with it in a while, and I believe it was also possible to set it from a website in JS with a xml config

@webhat Yes, but that's awful for anyone who doesn't make websites. No way to trust that 3p ones just do a url with pattern subst without leaking tracking info and shit.

@webhat This was one of the most viscously user hostile changes Mozilla ever made. Taking away a simple tool even normies could understand to customize search to meet their needs, and replacing it with "trust the big websites, lol".

@webhat And it's even more insulting to users that the code is all still there, just hidden behind an about:config var, and that they went to the trouble of making it invisible by default so you have to explicitly add the key, just as an extra fuck-you.

@dalias absolutely, that's what I meant with that I believed the feature was still there to be accessed from a webpage with JS. I'm sure that there are many other controls which are only accessible from webpages and no longer from the UI