In case you didn't know, that Google search bar up there in the top right corner of the Firefox window isn't restricted to just Google searches. First, if you click on the "G" you'll get menu with a nice selection of search options. If that's not enough, you can click the final item on the menu, "Add Engines..." which will take you to Firefox Central where you can find a few more search plugins.
But that's just the beginning of the fun. If you're into specialized searching and four or five search options just aren't enough for you, check out the mycroft project where you can find 1,286 search plugins!!
Posted by asa at December 26, 2004 10:21 AMBut a dropdown list THAT big is totally unmanageable! The management of those search engines is one area of Firefox's UI which definitely needs some improvement, but yes, the plugins are great!
Posted by: Phil Randal on December 26, 2004 11:34 AMBut I don't think there will be people who install all those 1286 search plugins... 10 or more search engines is more than enough. ;-)
Posted by: minghong on December 26, 2004 12:00 PMThe Mycroft page really needs a re-design, in my opinion - it's very "20th century". The new design of Mozilla Update is a vast improvement - how about Mycroft next? :)
Posted by: Neil T. on December 26, 2004 12:07 PMThat are search plugins for Mozilla nd Firefox (and not only firefox)
Posted by: matti on December 26, 2004 12:31 PMI great tip that I hadn't noticed until now is to hit Ctrl-Up/Down to switch between search engines after you've focused the search box with Ctrl-E.
Posted by: Joost Schuur on December 26, 2004 02:35 PMI don't know if this works for the windows version of Firefox, but in Unix multiuser environments, search plugins are unusable, because they are written to the Firefox program directory, which is write-protected for normal users (/path/to/firefox/searchplugins/).
--Thomas
Posted by: Thomas Kaschwig on December 26, 2004 03:31 PMThanks Asa for this heads up. As the project owner of mycorft, I think I should clarify some points here:
Phil Randal, you're absolutely right, more than a given amount of plugins are unmanageable. Especially that right now, you can't even sort them. Mycroft is putting them in categories, but they are useless in Firefox. But have you seen how the search plugins integrate in Mozilla-The Suite? You have categories, you can hide some plugins. The project http://searchsidebar.mozdev.org/ tries to bring these features back to Firefox, but as it looks like, isn't very successful at this. Help is wanted.
minghong, right, nobody will install 1286 search plugins. But it's always good to be able to find your 10 favorite search plugins among this number. Some people need translation plugins, some others need google in another language than English, some others want a plugin for their favorite news website etc... It's all about choice.
Neil T.: Yes, yes, yes and yes. I am the one to blame, but having started a new job 3 months ago and being a fresh new father of twin girls, my spare time has been dramatically cut down. Besides, I'm very poor at *design* so that anyone reading this and having some neat ideas is welcome to post them on the mycroft mailing list.
Thomas Kaschwig: this is probably the most heard-of bug involving the mycroft plugins. That's Bug 123315 and as I see, it's being worked on.
Let me also add that I'm getting around a dozen of submission e-mails daily, and several hundreds of search plugins that have already been submitted are waiting to be processed. However, my team and myself cannot cope with this workload so again, HELP IS WANTED!
I am using firefox overseas and when I try to use the Google search bar, it automatically defaults to the overseas verion of Google in a foreign language - not the one I want! I want the one from the U.S., in English -- anybody have any idas on how to FORCE it to go to Google in english? Anytime I switch it and save it in my preferences, the next time I open Firefox, it reverts tot the foreign language Google....
Thanks to all! Firefox rocks
TC!