Firefox Search Bar Mint Help

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chrisukr

Firefox Search Bar Mint Help

Post by chrisukr »

Hi everyone! I've just installed linux mint for the first time, having previously used ubuntu.

I'm having major problems accessing google search when other programs attempt to open a google search page in firefox. This is related to the mint firefox plugin. The 'mint custom' page loads every time, even though I have already deleted it from the quick search bar, and removed the firefox addon. This is not acceptable because I regularly use the google search for defining words, looking up stock quotes, and as a calculator/currency converter.

Here is one example (other programs have the same result):

1. I type in '100 dollars in euros' in gnome-do, and tell it to do a google search.
2. The custom mint search pops up in firefox instead (even though i had previously removed it), and displays only a search (which is useless), not the conversion

Note: After installing another plugin, I can get google search to work correctly from the quick search bar, but only from within firefox, NOT when a search is performed by another app.

I believe that gnome-do and the other programs just invoke firefox from the command line somehow, and for whatever reason it is still using the mint custom search. Does anyone have any idea on how I can change this.

Any ideas? BTW: I'm happy to use the custom search to support linux mint, but it should be customizable at the least, and not take hours of searching/trying different things to get our other apps to work with it.

Thanks
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
JasonLG

Re: Firefox Search Bar Mint Help

Post by JasonLG »

chrisukr wrote:Hi everyone! I've just installed linux mint for the first time, having previously used ubuntu.

I'm having major problems accessing google search when other programs attempt to open a google search page in firefox. This is related to the mint firefox plugin. The 'mint custom' page loads every time, even though I have already deleted it from the quick search bar, and removed the firefox addon. This is not acceptable because I regularly use the google search for defining words, looking up stock quotes, and as a calculator/currency converter.

Here is one example (other programs have the same result):

1. I type in '100 dollars in euros' in gnome-do, and tell it to do a google search.
2. The custom mint search pops up in firefox instead (even though i had previously removed it), and displays only a search (which is useless), not the conversion

Note: After installing another plugin, I can get google search to work correctly from the quick search bar, but only from within firefox, NOT when a search is performed by another app.

I believe that gnome-do and the other programs just invoke firefox from the command line somehow, and for whatever reason it is still using the mint custom search. Does anyone have any idea on how I can change this.

Any ideas? BTW: I'm happy to use the custom search to support linux mint, but it should be customizable at the least, and not take hours of searching/trying different things to get our other apps to work with it.

Thanks
You could do what I did and uninstall all things related to Firefox and install Chromium.(That's of course assuming you aren't a die-hard Firefox user) That was my solution as I found the Mint Google page less than useful myself.
chrisukr

Re: Firefox Search Bar Mint Help

Post by chrisukr »

Yeah, but for the time being I much prefer firefox. Chrome/Chromium is nice, but it is still a little rough around the edges, and doesn't have as many good addons as firefox.

My question is how can I begin to look into fixing this.

I know that I can download a firefox tarball and manually install, but this is annoying, and defeats the entire point of the package manager. There has to be some file somewhere that was modified to make firefox behave this way, and I was just wondering if anyone knows where I should look next.

I've tried searching through the /home/user/.mozilla/.... firefox folder, and I've removed all the custom search plugins from 'searchplugins', but this doesn't do anything. I am clearly modifying the wrong file somewhere.

Thanks
JasonLG

Re: Firefox Search Bar Mint Help

Post by JasonLG »

chrisukr wrote:Yeah, but for the time being I much prefer firefox. Chrome/Chromium is nice, but it is still a little rough around the edges, and doesn't have as many good addons as firefox.

My question is how can I begin to look into fixing this.

I know that I can download a firefox tarball and manually install, but this is annoying, and defeats the entire point of the package manager. There has to be some file somewhere that was modified to make firefox behave this way, and I was just wondering if anyone knows where I should look next.

I've tried searching through the /home/user/.mozilla/.... firefox folder, and I've removed all the custom search plugins from 'searchplugins', but this doesn't do anything. I am clearly modifying the wrong file somewhere.

Thanks
When was the last time you used Chromium? I agree about not having as good addons but I wouldn't call it rough around the edges. I'm using the latest daily builds which you would think would be the most rough version and it's lightning fast and very stable.

As far as Firefox is concerned you can dig in the about:config and see if you see the particular address and change it to a generic Google one.
chrisukr

Re: Firefox Search Bar Mint Help [SOLVED]

Post by chrisukr »

This is a bit offtopic to the original post, but I do use chrome from time to time. There are a few annoyances at the moment which prevent me from using it full time.

1. Type-ahead find (developers refusing to even add an option like firefox). It may not seem like a big deal, but as a developer I have many large documentation web pages open, and hitting CTRL-F every time is a royal pain compared to how easy it is with firefox. I tried the chrome extensions, but they are written in javascript and don't work well on large pages.

2. Strange middle-click behavior - sometimes when you middle click on a link, it doesn't open it in a new tab. Try it on some youtube. links. This is rather annoying. It is a confirmed bug I believe, so hopefully it will be resolved soon.

3. Ad blocking (will be addressed soon). The stable version of chrome i'm using doesn't support not downloading ads (the latest adblock attempts). In general it's just not as smooth as an experience as firefox.

Once these 3 things are fixed, then i would immediately switch to chrome/chromium. It might be a few years though. In general i'm quite happy with performance compared to firefox, it's a lot faster.

Back to firefox...

I have found a setting: browser.search.defaultenginename, which can be changed to let firefox use a different search engine. This works from the command line, e.g. firefox -search searchwords, but doesn't seem to work from gnome-do. At least I am making some progress :)

---EDIT---

Ok, it was a combination of 2 things. First you have to create a new option in linux mint for the search, you can do this by adding the google english search extension from the firefox extension page. Make sure it has a name different from 'Google' (unfortunately Linux Mint takes google, instead of Mint Google, etc...).

You can change this setting to:
browser.search.defaultenginename = 'exact name of your search enginer' (e.g. google english)

Then, the difficult part for me was realizing that gnome-do DOESN't just run a search from firefox, it actually searches your firefox folder for opensearch plugins, and then runs one of those. It is very important to make sure that you do not run the 'Google' search, otherwise you will get the non-functional mint page that doesn't support conversions/math/finance, etc....

Make sure the gnome-do is using 'google english' to search instead.
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