Where has the 'searchplugins' folder gone?
Hi, After recently updating my Firefox Web Browser (Version 40.0ß), I have noticed that the 'searchplugins' folder has disappeared from the 'browser' folder. I am currently using Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS. So this folder would be in /opt/Firefox/browser. This problem is also the same in Windows 7 (C:/Programs Files/Mozilla Firefox). Therefore I cannot import my customised .xml search plugins into Firefox. Please could you help me?
All Replies (3)
I wasn't aware of this change; I feel those search plugins must be "somewhere." Can you find them elsewhere in the program folder?
Also, have you considered placing them in your profile folder? There isn't a searchplugins folder by default, but one is created when you download a plugin. It's also likely to be safer during Firefox updates.
Okay, I found it. Starting in Firefox 40, the included set of search engine plugins are now part of the omni.ja file, which contains internal pages, scripts, etc. This was an anti-hijacking measure. See: Bug 1162569 – default engine files should be in the omni.ja file.
You probably need to modify the name parameter inside the .xml files, and perhaps also rename the files, to ensure that they are not preempted by the default plugins, since those take precedence over plugins in the profile folder.
So for example, the "built-in" google.xml has:
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
The shortname "must contain 16 or fewer characters of plain text." So a custom alias if you specified the parameter for verbatim results could be:
<ShortName>Google Verbatim</ShortName>
See: Bug 1109354 – prefer Firefox default engines over profile-installed plugins with the same name (I haven't tried to figure out exactly what needs to be changed)