How to bring back the drop down of search providers in the Firefox Search box

[+Warwagon MVC]

Every once in a while a company does something pretty stupid trying to make things better, only to make things way worse than they were before. A prime example of this is the Firefox search bar. In previous versions of Firefox you would click a down arrow in the left side of the search box to be able to choose which search provider you wish to use. Now all you get is this

 

 

Each time you wish to choose a different provider, you have to click on "Change Search Settings" and select a new Default search provider.

 

You think this blows? So do I!! Lets change it back to the way it use to be!

 

In the address bar of Firefox type about:config and press enter

 

 

Once you press enter you will get he following warning.

 

 

Click "I'll be careful, I promise"  .. because you will be careful, right?

 

Now in the search bar on the top,  type in browser.search.showOneOffButtons ... by the time you get half way through typing it you should it appear in the list below. At this point you can stop typing ... unless you are OCD and you just have to finishing it.

 

 

By default the value will be true. To change the value to False, simply double click on it.

 

 

The hard part is now done! Now just exit Firefox and open it back up...

 

TA DA!!!

 

 

Your search list is back! Did you cheer!?  .. oh well, some people have no emotion...

 

Enjoy!

[Junner2003]

But don't you get the different (installed) search providers in the drop down as buttons on the bottom anyway when you type something into the search? You can then simply click on a different provider to search with that one instead.

 

 

Why would you want to always switch your default search provider permanently? Most people don't do that and they only switch temporarily to a different one in case their default doesn't provide the wanted results.

[madd-hatter]

Or just use the Omnibar add-on.

[Aergan]

I take it that this is for Beta / Nightly? I'm still seeing the default method on 34.0.5

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

I take it that this is for Beta / Nightly? I'm still seeing the default method on 34.0.5

As far as I know the new search has only been rolled out in the US at this point. Fwiw I see the old search in Firefox stable here in Germany as well.

[strollin]

But don't you get the different (installed) search providers in the drop down as buttons on the bottom anyway when you type something into the search? You can then simply click on a different provider to search with that one instead.

 

 

Why would you want to always switch your default search provider permanently? Most people don't do that and they only switch temporarily to a different one in case their default doesn't provide the wanted results.

 

I'm running FF 35.0 and it works as shown in Tumultus post above.  I prefer this to the way it worked previously.

[Neyht Member]

I think you like or hate this feature based on how you use the browser. 

 

I haven't had the search bar on the toolbar for the longest time.  Then this thing came around and I had to use the search bar because quick switching search providers seems to be broken on the new tab page at the moment. 

 

It also seems I can't select or unselect one click search engines in the options menu which was working at one point and now isn't... [edit] ahh, that's parts broken if browser.preferences.inContent is set to true.  So that's why it's not enabled in the nightlies yet.

 

On behalf of Mozilla, I'd like to welcome all 100 percent of firefox's userbase to the 34.0.5 extended beta test.  We know you downloaded stable because you didn't want to run code that was written yesterday. But you know what? ######!

[He's Dead Jim]

Thanks for the tip