Comment by abhinavsharma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abhinavsharma | Hacker News Reader

This title is a little misleading. The original title of the post is "Search Engine add-ons to be removed from addons.mozilla.org", which implies that a special class of addons will be removed from the online store and merged with regular extensions. Firefox has never supported OpenSearch in the same way Chrome has, where you can type in "yout" + tab and search YouTube immediately.

Opensearch engines could be added to firefox from this page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search-tools/ .This in practice was just an extension but a different schema. They probably just want to consolidate and maintain only one schema for all extensions.

Now, it is still truly surprising to me that it's easier to use third-party search in Chrome than in Firefox, given all of Mozilla's talk about the Google monopoly. In Chrome, adding a search engine is as simple as going to chrome://settings/searchEngines and adding a string like "bing.com?q=%s" while in Firefox the only way I can find out so far is packaging an extension and loading it up.

You can do this in firefox, too, but it's quite hidden and doesn't have a nice UI. Bookmarks can have keywords associated with them in the bookmarks editor, so you can add a "Bing" bookmark with URL "https://bing.com/?q=%s" and Keyword "bing". It'll work, but the "bing" prefix won't be highlighted as it is in Chrome when using it to do a search.

The "Add a keyword for this search" context menu option automates creation of this bookmark, but you can also do it manually if firefox doesn't recognize a search field or something like that

It is quite "highlighted": after typing exact keyword it is the first suggestion below URL bar and after typing space and some query it reflects this by displaying "domain.tld: query" there, seams good enough to me.

thanks for the tip! good to know it's possible

You can add a keyword for known search engines in the settings as well. Double click on the search engine keyword area, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-sea...

The title is a quote from the second sentence in the article. The original title of the post is about the immediate change, but Mozilla is still planning to deprecate OpenSearch.

Firefox definitely has supported OpenSearch. When you arrive at a page that has an OpenSearch description document, there is a button in the address bar triple-dot menu to add the site's search engine to firefox. On mobile, you could long press on an input field to do the same.

Good to know about the "..." thing

Even though I'll miss it myself as a power user I think this is actually fine so long as there's a common standard for integrating third-party engines.

Opensearch came about when search was in its nasency and people envisioned all sorts of complex needs for it. 90%+ of opensearch schemas just end up being something like "searchengine.org/?q=%s" in practice.

The main thing we'll lose out in the simpler pattern is autocomplete, which you could specify via "<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json"

What the article doesn't make clear and I wish it did was what Firefox's future of supporting third party search engines looks like. I just came back to firefox after 8 years away, and it seems from some of the UI changes like the "This time search with" feature that they do want to encourage a diversity of search engines overall.

This may just be confusing/bad comms, I hope.

I've always installed search engines in Firefox:

a. From the Mycroft project page b. From the search engine's own page by right-clicking and selecting "add a keyword for this search".

In any case, it seems [1] the announcement is mostly about the addons.mozilla.org listing than the removal of OpenSearch or other capabilities in Firefox. The wording is confusing and the link doesn't completely clear it up, suggesting it may indeed be on the way out (but not necessarily on the same timeline as the AMO removal announced here).

[1] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/deprecation-of-opensearch-xm...

You used to be able to make an XML file with the search query and base64 encoded icon and put it in the search engines folder in your profile. It wasn't the easiest way for non technical users, but once you knew how it wasn't bad. It made it easy to backup, together with bookmarks.html.

As of at least Firefox 69.0.3, you can right click most query fields and choose "Add a keyword for this search". It works about the same in e.g. Opera and Vivaldi.

It's unclear if the "intent to deprecate OpenSearch" also means removing this functionality.

But those are keywords in the URL ("Awesome") bar though, right? I prefer to use the search bar for search and URL bar for URLs.

As far as I remember that functionality doesn't use OpenSearch but instead save the search query string as a bookmark.

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