Back in 2015, Firefox's search bar became completely un-useable. Since then, I've fixed the problem with Classic Theme Restorer, but that add-on is no longer supported.
S… (tuilleadh eolais)
Back in 2015, Firefox's search bar became completely un-useable. Since then, I've fixed the problem with Classic Theme Restorer, but that add-on is no longer supported.
So how do we get the old search bar back? How are people supposed to search without a proper search bar?
For the record, I count…
4 SERIOUS PROBLEMS WITH THE NEW SEARCH BAR:
1. The new search bar was supposed to make searching faster. What a lie! It takes just as many clicks as the old bar, except it's now much SLOWER because you have to select the search engine EVERY SINGLE TIME you search!
2. Another thing slowing it down is the lack of text labels on the icons: You're now forced to look through a bunch of icons to find the engine you want! This is crazy! Can you imagine if they printed phone books with no names, only pages full of 'icons' of the different services!? Would that "speed things up"? Never!
3. Most people regularly use MORE THAN ONE engine (e.g. Google, YouTube, Spotify, Twitter, etc.). So why are we forced to pick one "default" engine? Imagine if your fridge asked you to choose one "default food", then every time you went to the fridge it always took out that one thing unless you told it otherwise! How irritating!
4. Perhaps the most deeply annoying thing about the new search is that the search process is now BACKWARDS to the user's thought process. When people search the web, we ALWAYS know what KIND of media we're searching for FIRST and THEN we think of the search query. Can you imagine if a guy took a girl on a date and asked her "Please give me the name of the movie or meal you want" and THEN AFTERWARDS asked her if she'd prefer a movie or a meal? That's exactly what the new search bar does!
This is a plea for help, but also an appeal to Mozilla to fix the crazy new search bar. (If devs are reading, I'm an interactive designer and I'd be more than happy to provide details of a perfectly elegant solution for how the bar can be adjusted to accommodate fans of both the old and new style.)