About Firefox's Google search engine

[varonbondumb]

I found this forum thread and clem's blog post (http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=142) about mint's custom google search after being annoyed by the inherent lack of full google search capabilities, like everyone else here. I assumed that Mint was getting some money and I wanted to confirm it before I changed the search back to normal google. After finding out that it is one of their primary sources of income, I will happily keep it as it is and merely add google as another search engine for when I need images / videos / whatever that the mint custom search can't provide.

As for "providing a choice", I feel that one has enough of a choice by being able to http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html and searching for the normal google plugin. I have both mint custom google search and normal google search in mine, but mint is set to default. If mint were to offer a "choice", I'm afraid the majority would opt out without knowing the huge contribution they could otherwise give to Mint (freely and effortlessly), thus depriving Mint of a huge revenue stream which allows them to operate and offer us such a wonderful product.

I'm not in a position to donate money, so I'll gladly take one for the team every time I search and be *slightly* inconvenienced 1/20th of the time.

[lmintnewb]

No kidding on the branded firefox thing. Imo they should work out some kind of profit share with the mozilla people for making it the default Mint browser. Split ad revenue with them for the number of mint users. etc.

Well many things occur they could do/try. O course that's easy for me to say. But have zero doubt this isn't good for firefox. More often than not people are probably just going to offload it like yesterdays garbage for another browser. Then FF loses a user and Mint loses any revenue they were getting anyway. ala: lose/lose situation there for sure.

Jmo ... but telenux. If something that trivial and ridiculous is enough to shy you away from a kickbutt piece of software like linux mint and the stuff these developers have made. Then ... don't let the door hitcha.

Random and pointless stuff:

Not because i am so concerned about their data tracking, but I object to their data analysis and geotragging.

Although have no doubt your pinky finger knows more about linux, linux mint than I do. Just wanted to clear something up cause this is one of my pet peeves. All this I'm protecting my privacy blahblahblah rhetoric.

Unless you have your own internet backbone ( and even then.) Every webpage, web-file and pixel you upload and download to the internet is more than likely made record of somewhere. Hate to break it folks. But if you like midget porn0. Then your ISP and gawd knows how many others know ya do too.

Google owns major datacenters from here to timbuktu along with a handful of tier 1 providers who can get data from any murky corner of the web at will. If they want to know who you are, where you are, whatcha doing ... Your favorite band. They already do ( for that matter they'd just need to visit your facebook, lol.) ... Ya just funnin yaself if you think anything you're doing online is private.

Well ... without some extreme measures being taken. Just sayin.

[quake]

I really wish mint had the default Google search engine.

[MALsPa]

As for "providing a choice", I feel that one has enough of a choice by being able to http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html and searching for the normal google plugin. I have both mint custom google search and normal google search in mine, but mint is set to default. If mint were to offer a "choice", I'm afraid the majority would opt out without knowing the huge contribution they could otherwise give to Mint (freely and effortlessly), thus depriving Mint of a huge revenue stream which allows them to operate and offer us such a wonderful product.

It's interesting to me that Mint is the only distro that does this to generate revenue -- the only distro I know of, anyway.

One always has the choice of not using Mint if this is too much of an annoyance...

[Carl]

If you can't deal with it, don't like it, or you feel that this does not go with the "Linux philosophy" of things, then make any of the work around people mention here, or pick another distro

Those are pretty much the only choices that Mint gives us. It would be nice if there was a simple option during the installation or something, a choice to use the Minty Google search engine or not, but that's not the way the Mint devs want to go apparently. The fact that it's there by default, and you have to find a work-around if you don't like it, is one of the few turn-offs I find about Mint.

That's because they know everyone would automatically reject it if it was an installer option

[pincushman]

I am sure this is a good revenue stream for Mint. Most distros just set the browser homepage to a custom google search. I found it very annoying and even with the plugin removed still got the custom results so I looked around and found this (which worked for me):

cd /usr/share/linuxmint/common/artwork/firefox/
sudo wget http://mxr.mozilla.org/firefox/source/b ... .xml?raw=1 -O google.xml.fixed
sudo mv google.xml google.xml.orig
sudo mv google.xml.fixed google.xml
sudo cp google.xml /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml

Just my opinion but this crossed a line and may prevent a lot of people from going with Mint.

[Larro]

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

[ynnebbenny]

It reminds me of building a great racing car (Mint) and then placing a speed governor on it. (Mint search)
or
Painting the Mona Lisa then throwing a can of black paint over it.
or
Making the bed without a crease, but doing a poo between the sheets.

Com'on guys, mint is close to perfect but you go and castrate it with mint search.

EDIT: It would also be good if the moment the search box was clicked in, that everything was highlighted (as done in the windows versions of FF.)
I know there is a fix for this but it should be like that by default.

[Lady]

cd /usr/share/linuxmint/common/artwork/firefox/

no such directory found;



PS:
Sorry pic is a bit too big

[mint-user-]

hello. i was an old user of ubuntu who wanted to try mint. i have used it for some month and i couldn't stand this kind of google search. i looked for a solution several times, and i saw that some users were able to configure the good google search but changing the system was needed, not for a normal user like me without computers knowledge. now i have more time because of holydays i can do a clean install in order to return to ubuntu. i only wanted you know that this policy can make your users to leave your os and they wont be registering on the forum to advise like me. thanks you very much for the other interesting features that woth nothing because of this poor google search