Adding custom search engines

[maria2101]

I still miss the ability to add a custom search engine in Firefox Desktop, which has been there in Firefox for Android for years. Kinda weird that Android has an option the desktop version lacks of. Or do I need to enable dev mode or something in the config?

Clicking "find more search engines" only leads to the addons page. On android however, you can add your own site and you can then directly search it from the address bar, for example I added https://www.m.dict.cc/?s=%s to quickly lookup dict.cc for translations, it directly searches for the word I type in.

[rzm]

I've been using https://osdgen.com/ to add custom search engines.

The reason you can't add every site that has a search is because they don't include an OpenSearch description document in the HTML. You can write and host your own OpenSearch documents like Mycroft Project  but OSDGen.com let's you generate and add them on the spot.

[deimos]

Without adding a custom search, built-in search is completely unusable in firefox. Google is broken for me, for some reason it puts results in russian first if it can, even though I don't speak it. I have to manually add /search?lr=-(lang_ru)&q= in the search bar just to be able to actually have some useful results (I use a bookmark currently). Why would you remove such a feature is beyond me. If google pays you for that in fear of people switching away from them, at least let us customize the GOOGLE search!

[Masca19]

Unbelievable that such a simple and universal option would be removed altogether from Firefox. We're talking about being able to use a custom URL on a web browser, not learning C++. I use various websites with a simple structure that do not support the opensearch.xml protocol and this feature is just essential for me.
I have used Firefox for years but now consider switching to a chromium-based browser.

[hcschuetz]

My use case:

Google seems to provide a way to change its behavior to a "classical" search by adding the (somewhat magic) query parameter "udm=14".  I'd like to add an URL template to my Firefox including that parameter (in addition to the standard Google engine).

There are workarounds such as the browser extension "udm14" or the search page udm14.com, but I'd prefer to configure this directly in Firefox so that I don't have to rely on (and trust) third parties.

[hcschuetz]

Ok, I was able to configure a variant of Google search with query parameter "udm=14" after setting the Firefox config parameter browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh = true.  But now I'm apparently using an undocumented Firefox feature.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

An subject https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1957439
Currently under Firefox Nightly https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1967739

[morphles]

Just another WTF from me!

Also thanks guys with that custom about:config option that you need to figure out and add... It works and is great. But Mozilla, wtf seriously? That add button 3 levels deep in settings is so scary to new users? Or what?...

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

About.
browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh

Firefox 140 beta bellow.

Apparently, wait and see, Firefox 140 release https://whattrainisitnow.com/calendar

[Jon]

Good news...

This is now delivered in Firefox 140: 

Check out the Release Notes to learn more — and of course, please continue sharing feedback and ideas to improve the Firefox experience 🙌

[Jon]

There's also some more info here in this support article. 

Let us know if you have any questions 😃 

[Jon]

(Note: similar ideas have been merged into this thread)