Search Engine Editor, please?

[robsku]

I find search engine management to be a rather cumbersome and unwelcome part of my FireFox experience. I have a couple dozen browsers installed (every one I could find in Fedora 39 repos, plus a couple that had to be installed either from proprietary binary blob [e.g. Vivaldi], or compiled from source [e.g. ELinks (with TrueColor support compiled in)]), but most are there just for testing — although I do use multiple browsers depending on what I'm doing.

My top-3 browsers on desktop/laptop are FireFox, Vivaldi and ELinks — the latter being only a text-browser, but the best one I know of, and even it has better search engine management UI, basically everything I want. Vivaldi seems to do everything that FireFox does, and more — again, everything I want.

But FireFox. It basically has no search engine management to speak of. You can add them, although sometimes only by creating your own opensearch.xml type file to get what you want. After adding it, you can only edit the keyword list and remove the search engine. I can't even edit the search engine's shown name after I've added it.

This is basic stuff in Vivaldi and many other modern browsers already. I'm suggesting you add an editor to edit a search engine — perhaps by right-clicking a search engine in Settings, or just double-clicking its name? The way you do it is not important — Vivaldi does it one way, and it really pleases me.

The editor should allow not only modifying the search engine's name, but also the search URL, the search suggestions URL and even the icon used for the search engine.

Otherwise, I love FireFox. I think Vivaldi is the only one that even can compete, but I don't like it not being FOSS, and it's still behind FireFox in the end — I would likely choose it if I had to choose a preferred browser in an environment where adding my favourite extensions would be a no-no. But extensions are what made FireFox — I mean, the first version I remember being really lightweight and stripped down. NetScape's features made browsing so much better. Until you got to add-on's, and realized how much more you could do with it, and it had barely been born! 😄

But this is one area where extensions can't add the missing functionality, and power users like myself are left with cumbersome ways (like removing the search engine and adding a new modified version of it by making your own opensearch.xml for it). Please consider this, I'm sure that there is a large number of users who have been wishing it was possible in FF, maybe even tempted by other browsers because of the lack of it!

Love you.

[Jon]

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