Localized Search in Firefox Search Box

Project Name

Project Description

Firefox features a search box that can be customized to work with different search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, etc.). Most websites have their own search facilities, but the location of the search box on the page varies considerably. This project creates a mechanism for Firefox to pick up a web site's search mechanism and make it accessible to the user through the Firefox search box so that users have a consistent place to look for site-specific search.

Project Leader

Kerry M. Singh

Project Details

Release v.01

This release demonstrates my understanding of how some searchbar features currently work in the Firefox browser. I've uploaded a patch file that outputs a series of dump("DIAGNOSTIC MESSAGE: Function Name - What the functioning is doing") statements to the terminal window while running a debug build of Firefox. Specifically, what functions/methods are called and what happens to the searchbar menu when the following events occur:

The browser auto-detects a site that has a search plugin available.
The user selects the button to display the search engine list when a search plugin is available.
The user selects the option to "Add this search engine".
The user changes the current search engine by selecting it from the search bar drop-down list (menu).
The user moves the position of a search engine using the Search Engine Manager.
The user removes an auto-detected search engine from the list of "installed" search engines.

Release Target for v.02