Fixing Firefox Search Engines
My recent adventure with the duckduckgo search engine stirred some old cobwebs. I discovered that modifying Firefox search engines is not too bad.
Once upon a time the default Firefox search engines were simple XML files. Many Firefox versions ago, when I learned the developers were moving to a json file to store the search engines, I mindfully saved all of my search engine XML files.
Despite this nonsense, custom search engines may be still stored in the user’s profile or Firefox system directory. For the latter the path is $FIREFOX_HOME/distribution/searchplugins/common/.
I edited a copy of my preserved duck_duck_go.xml search engine file. I changed the template= path to https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/.
I copied the modified file to $FIREFOX_HOME/distribution/searchplugins/common/.
I closed Firefox.
In my Firefox profile I deleted search.json.mozlz4.
I launched Firefox, which automatically created a new search.json.mozlz4 with my modified duckduckgo search engine.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Firefox
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