Just tried it, nice feature! Its a little bit "quiet"/"discreet" though, a first-time bubble pop-up or something, to just make the user aware of the feature would be nice.

Mark, agreed. I assume that some work on UI could still take place by looking at the road map. I have thought since the beginning that the search icon in gray looks a bit out of place in Winstripe and assumed that some more work would happen on it (I remember hearing that there will be a theme face lift - minor changes - before 2.0 was released, not sure that has happened unless it simply meant the add-ons manager and the Go menu). If that works take place, the red tint may be a much stronger visual that there is a search plug-in available. As it is now, you have to look for the red.

WFM

As per the comments above, the change is quite discrete. Looking at this from my dads point of view, I can see his thought process now:

1. Notice the magnifying glass has gone red.
2. Click the magnifying glass.

Very cool though.

Mark

I have thought since the beginning that the search icon in gray looks a bit out of place in Winstripe and assumed that some more work would happen on it

Right, that's bug 337131.
Besides this, the new theme proposals should be made public soon.

Actually, it doesn't work as well as it should.

1. Notice the magnifying glass has gone red.
2. Click the red magnifying glass (but not directly on the dropdown).

Expected:
Something about why the glass is red, or maybe pull down the dropdown showing you can add the engine.

Actual:
Submits an empty search for the currently selected engine (taking you away from the site where you could get the new engine!)

Worked for me. But for now as poor usability as previously described.

Good work, I hope your team will manage to include the search plug ins update system before 2.0 final. Some thoughts:

1/ Red is not a good color, red means error, bad, dangerous, avoid going any further; I think the standard color associated to 'new' - and far more positive - is yellow. Not really sure if it'll play well with the yellow secure location bar; if not, use green ... anything but red.

2/ I would just hate to see a bubble tip showing up every time I hit a website that attaches an open search reference to their page(s). Plus, as a web master, this behavior would certainly holds me from adding that feature in website I maintain. Two solutions:
a) Make it animated; animation draws attention, maybe have a flashing button background or an animated icon; or
b) Have a small icon appear to the left of the search button (just like the feed icon in the location bar). It'll be consistent with your UI and much easier to see for the average Joe (it should not appear if included in the list)

Just made a test with my brother, who uses compute once a week or less, and his first thoughts on the red button was: search function not working on this site...

I wouldn't have noticed it if I wasn't warned to expect something different, and even then it took me a while to find. At which point I clicked the magnifying glass. I think it needs work. ;)

The "search plug-in auto discovery" should work just like the "feed auto discovery". It is connected to the page you are visiting so it should show it in the adresbar. Just show magnifying glass next to the feed icon.

Thats awsome. Never heard about that before. I'll put it on my todo things to do on my page.

- ØØ -

See bug 339735: Improve UI for adding search engines detected from link rel.

I'm assuming that the message bubble means the yellow bar that appears mainly when a popup is blocked.

I've always thought that it should be shown at least once for new features. For example, the web feeds icon... clicking on it really doesn't give any indication what it does. What I'm saying is something like the "This icon on your status bar means that a pop up was blocked..." in all pre-1.0 builds, only using the new information bar mechanism for web feeds, and this search feature. Just showing it once, it'll be unobtrusive and the user is given some sort of idea as to what the strange new icon is. As is, I'm curious to know if the user will even notice the "Add ... search" item on the menu, and dismiss the strange new icon as randomness. Does the average user access that menu regularly?

And yeah, red=bad, action search button changing=bad. But other than that, a nice addition.

Does anyone know if you have to add a mimetype to make this work (I know nothing about servers). Fx makes the magnifying glass on my page red. But if you try to add it to Fx, it complains and say it can't be downloaded. I tried to randomly add:

application/opensearchdescription+xml

xml files in CPanel on the server, without that helping. And now I can't even delete it again...:) I should never have started this should I..:)

- ØØ -

Got it working with some help from "Gavin Sharp". Sorry for cluttering up your comments.

- ØØ -

It is really not discoverable. Nice feature though.