Recent changes have made the use of search engines in Firefox less and less discoverable and usable. By "search engines" I mean the feature that allows the user to add the current website to their search engines via the OpenSearch standard (usually?), and use it easily afterwards.
In an age where general-purpose search engines are less and less useful, and where AI slop is flooding social networks and the Web in general, we need to empower people by inciting them to choose their trusted sources for finding information. We need to counter the narrative that users should ask a chatbot which movies an actor has played in, and instead push forward the voluntary act of searching on IMDb.
Firefox used to be not so bad at that (although it always was kind of a "power user" feature I think), but it seems to be straying further away from this direction. This is a bad move that isn’t helping setting us apart.
Concretely:
- when a website offers a search engine (via OpenSearch and/or a simple search form marked as such), and the user uses it (at least once, maybe more?), we need to push some kind of prompt to the user letting them know of the ability to add it to their search engines. Or potentially even adding it automatically (is that what Chromium used to do? or does?), but that risks hiding the feature if not done in a smart way.
- when users start typing in the address/search bar, we should offer them more "aggressively" to use search engines directly. It should be almost as simple as typing "imdb carey mulligan."
- maybe that needs to take the form of "onboarding" modals at some point, or something similar. It’s a behaviour change that we need to push.
