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evilpie / add-custom-search-engine

Add a custom search engine to the list of available search engines in Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-custom-search-engine/
Mozilla Public License 2.0
173 stars 13 forks source link

Make it available for Firefox Android #20

Open fschrofner opened 4 years ago

fschrofner commented 4 years ago

Not sure if it's easily doable, but right now the add-on is not available on Android. Would be nice if it's just a flag to set, so that we can use the same search engines on mobile.

evilpie commented 4 years ago

I am only using the new Firefox for Android (Beta/Nightly), which only has a limited sub-set of extension so I can't test this.

missmatsuko commented 2 years ago

Adding search engines with a URL is a built-in feature of Firefox for Android:

Screenshot of Firefox Android search settings.
fschrofner commented 2 years ago

@missmatsuko you are right, this should cover 99% of people's use cases. however, if you want to add a search engine, which requires basic authentication, for example, this does not work. at least it didn't work for me, when i tried to add my self-hosted searx instance, back when i created this issue.

firefox will always verify the domain you are entering and does not allow you to add it when that verification fails. i think they could have left it with a warning and it would have been alright, but for some reason they didn't and left us in this weird situation. you can easily simulate this by trying to add a search engine of some made up domain, which doesn't exist.

this addon would still work fine in this scenario as it doesn't perform any checks. so, that would be one reason why it would be nice to have it on mobile as well.

missmatsuko commented 2 years ago

@fschrofner did firefox say why it failed validation? Is it just https maybe? I don't know why it'd be different for an extension.

fschrofner commented 2 years ago

It does not explicitly mention why the error occurs, it just shows a generic error message. But based on the behavior I believe that it's related to the basic authentication. It works fine for searx instances which do not require authentication. But in reality it could be anything as this additional request could cause a number of other issues, like this one here. Also, it's not because of https as the service was available via https.

I don't know the implementation details so I'm not sure how it is handled internally, but this addon does not enforce any checks when adding the search engine and therefore does not prevent you from adding it even when it might be broken. This is arguably better than blocking it for users who know what they are doing.