Firefox Support Forum

I hose sat for a friend a while back. I left my PC running so room-mate could use it. Upon returning I could not access my chosen search engine (duckduckgo), I get this as the effort

"Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at duckduckgo.com.

   The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
   If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
   If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web."

In fact I cannot access ANY search engine....... However it works on my tablet so I know it still exists and I grilled my room-mate who denies using the pc or downloading anything..... (he is fairly pc ignorant so I kinda believe him).

So what settings could have suddenly come into place that block me from my chosen search engine? (FTR I cannot access search engines in IE either and I HATE IE so having to check there made me feel unclean). (I also checked with the anti virus and cannot see that it is blocking me but Kaspersky was shut down and still no search engines so I do not believe it is the issue).

I have tried for weeks to get access to my search engine and am so stumped I now go to you.

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.)

When I click the Icon to open Firefox Mozilla if opens OK. However, when I tyupe in the webepage i want to find it returns an error message ion a blank page. The search is obviously the problem but why. At present i am using MS-Internet Explorer but miss using Firefox. Can you help or do you suggest I download it again. If I dowbload it I want to keep the changes I made but I am happy to use Firefox Mozilla'a search engine. Thank you Barbara Bibi

If I want to search something which includes dot（.）, firefox immediately recognize as url so i always failure to search it. So I still leave search window inside firefox. Is there anything temporarily disable this recognition and search it in url bar（awesomebar;megabar）? Is there hidden commands such as !nourl:blahblah?

I have plenty of tags on bookmarks. If I can't remember my tag's name, but remember that it's about "cooking" how do I search for tag names with that word?

The search bar on the upper right of bookmarks gives all urls with the word. I want to search my list of tags itself.

Also I'd like to do the same with keywords.

When searching history, I'd like a more sophisticated search that lets me pick the time range, and tags.

Also when viewing site history, I can see them by last date viewed. I'd like to view by date first viewed. (Last modifed isn't it)

Thanks!

My default search setting keeps reverting back to Yahoo after I reset my computer. Closing Firefox keeps the one I change it to but restarting the computer changes it.

I can't open the history sidebar. The "Show your History" option opens it's tab fine (the drop-down that says "Show History Sidebar", "Clear Recent History..." ect.). But, when clicking on the "Show History Sidebar", nothing comes up. I can use the "Show All History" option but the sidebar doesn't open for some reason.

I've been having a great deal of trouble with Firefox lately on my MS Surface Pro 3 running Windows 10. It began with my passwords not automatically filling in. I tick the check box and next time I start Firefox, it's unchecked. I tried all of the troubleshooting ideas I could find here and none of them worked. I tried refreshing. I tried safe mode. I even uninstalled Firefox and deleted the Mozilla folder in %appdata%. Reinstalling a fresh version of Firefox with no add-ons, no extensions and sync turned off still didn't fix the problem. To add to my woes, today I am unable to search from the Firefox start page. When I type a search term, the progress indicator just swirls away and nothing happens. The same goes if I type the search in the address bar or the search box in the new tab page. If I open up a Google page, the search works fine. There's obviously something on my system that is interfering with Firefox, but for the life of me, I don't know what it is. The only thing that comes to mind is my antivirus, Trend Micro, but disabling it didn't help. The issue with the passwords started a little over a week ago (at least, that's when I noticed it) and I only noticed the search problem today.

In former days I could double click on a search engine and edit it. This has gone.

Only adding new and deleting searchengines now possible . A long time ago I could just edit entries in /usr/lib/firefox/distribution/searchplugins/locale/.

for example (like in chrome now) : engine name: jahr URL: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&tbs=qdr:y Best regards hhgoten

I am still looking for accessibility fixes. I have sensory processing issues, and all the animation online *hurts,* so I need ways to disable animation.

If I search for accessibility, it returns results involving access to this or that, unrelated to accessibility for disabled users.

If I search for disable animation accessibility -access it still returns results involving access to this or that... What is a point of searches if the results don't involve important search terms and contain excluded terms?

Mozilla opens as normal, bookmarks work just fine, but entering search words does not. Happened since yesterday. Not a techie so a bit lost. Sorce has entity % global in red ?

Thanks in anticipation.

Hi!

I'm desperately searching for a convenient method to search multiple sites with one keyword from the search bar. The corresponding search engines (OpenSearch) are already installed, either from Mycroft¹ or by using Add to Search Bar² and configured with keywords. A keyword search for a separate site, f.i. "w" for "Wikipedia", works fine, but after a long research I couldn't find any extension or method, that will assign several already existent search engines to a keyword. This is mainly needed for dictionary lookups and searching across some related sites, so the ideal procedure would look as follows: The keyword "de" should search through several german-english dictionaries (like dict.cc, leo.org and so on), that are already configured as search engines with their own keywords.

The only way, that comes near this scenario is using OminBar³, which allows to use several keywords at once (e.g. "@a,e,w foo bar"), when performing a search from the search or the address bar respectively.

Powersearchers out there, please give me a hint how to accomplish this. Thanks in advance!

¹ http://mycroftproject.com ² https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/add-to-search-bar ³ https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/omnibar

Running firefox 38.0 on Xubuntu 15.04 i can't use my own xml file in /usr/lib.../searchplugins/locale/(de,en-US)/ anymore. Managing searchengines/plugins doesn't show my files anymore. Under Firefox 37.0 and Kubuntu 14.10 every selfmade xml file like goo_year.xml was selectable. I can only add new searchengines/plugins from web . For example "Google Default" installs in ...home/.mozilla/firefox/(profile-name)../searchplugins/google-defaults.xml and there I could modify params. I can add &tbs=qdr:y and it works. But why is a copied and renamed abc.xml file not showing up ? Is there now a kind of database instead of only this files ?

running Firefox 38.0.1 on a Windows 7 machine. When I start google search, nothing shows up below the top search bar (with the white magnifying glass on the right). That space is all white.

I have tried everything I can find to stop bing.vc from opening as the start page in firefox version 39 and so far nothing has worked. I am unable to find any reference to in in about:config; a refresh of firefox did not help; no add-ons refer to it and conduit or search protect do not appear in uninstall programs in control panel. No malware removal tool has any effect on it and I have used all that were recommended on the Mozilla support site. Help please!!

I don't know how it happened, but cannot get google search to stay as my search engine. I am using the most current version of Firefox there is. I have deleted all the other search engines but it still goes back to yahoo. Do not like yahoo, I want my google back, lol. Please advise me how to fix this problem, thank you.