If you do not get a response to a question posted in this forum, please try sending a message to the project's mailing list or to the project owner directly.

[1] Submitted by: Juergen Flosbach on Monday February 16th 2004

Question about install search plugin under Linux

I haven't found an answer in all the documentation so fare about how to install a search plugin under Linux as NO ROOT. I know, I can do it as root but that's something I never would do. But this site doesn't give me any option to first download a search plugin and maybe lateron install the plugin.

Is there anything I have overlooked ?

How are you installing a search plugin ?

Thanks

Juergen Flosbach

//juergen_flosbach@bigfoot.de

[2] Submitted by: mat @ mycroft on Tuesday February 17th 2004

Juergen,

I install Mozilla in my user directory instead of the global way. There are no issues when you install Mozilla that way. The short explanation is that you have to give yourself rights to write in the searchplugins folder of your Mozilla installation. Whatever way an individual chooses to do that, is up to them to decide.

You can download a compressed archive of all our plugins from http://mycroft.mozdev.org/plugins/allplugins.tar.gz (updated daily, providing changes are made). This is also linked from the advanced download/install form.

"You can download all plugins as a .tar.gz archive (804kB - last modified 2004-02-17, it will open with WinZip and other compression programs). Unpack the archive and copy the plugins you want into the searchplugins directory of your Mozilla installation." -- http://mycroft.mozdev.org/install.html

Hope this helps.

[3] Submitted by: Mark on Monday April 5th 2004

I do not have a ~/Library/Internet Search Sites/My Channel/ folder. I created it and mozilla did not find the search plugin as advertised. I just want to install a custom search plugin in a directory that will not get overwritten when I install a new version of mozilla. Thanks

[4] Submitted by: Baris Baser on Monday April 26th 2004

So where are the plugin files in FireFox 0.8 ??

[5] Submitted by: ricky @ mycroft on Monday April 26th 2004

re: comment 4
Search plug-in files are stored in the searchplugins directory inside your firefox installation directory. For Mac OS X users, this is inside the application folder (Firefox.app), but clicking on it will start Firefox. To open this folder and see the folders beneath, control-click Firefox.app, and select "Show Package Contents". A typical location of your searchplugins folder is:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins

[6] Submitted by: raddazong on Friday June 4th 2004

Is there a way to manipulate the order of mycroft elements in the pull down menu?
Thanks.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i386; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

[7] Submitted by: wouter on Saturday July 3rd 2004

This whole project is quite useless for Linux users (and I presume many security-minded Windows users too, if such a thing isn't an oxymoron) when we can't install the search plugins. Or when they are overwritten by auto-updating package systems. Or when users don't have a choice which search plugins are in the list, because there is only a system-wide directory. I don't understand why this isn't user-configurable in the profile, like most other settings... Quite absurd.

I suggest we all go to the Mozilla bugzilla and vote for bug #123315.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; privacy; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8

[8] Submitted by: wouter on Saturday July 3rd 2004

raddazong:

The plugins are shown in the order they have been copied into the directory (by inode order, I guess). Empty the directory and copy the plugins one by one in the order you want them. It's a hack but it works for me.

In case you need more info, type in a console (as root)
# cd /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/searchplugins/ (wherever that is on your system)
# mkdir ../TMP; mv * ../TMP
# cp ../TMP/google.* .
# cp ../TMP/cpan.* .
... etc until you've copied all your plugins ...
# rmdir ../TMP/
# echo woohoo

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; privacy; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8

[9] Submitted by: wouter on Saturday July 3rd 2004

uh... make those cp's mv's or the rmdir 'rm -rf'.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; privacy; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8

[10] Submitted by: mohd fairol on Mon, 5 Jul 2004 21:28:10 -0400

no yet.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

[11] Submitted by: Boris Goldowsky on Sun, 11 Jul 2004 11:01:51 -0400

The link to the bug report on this doesn't seem to work any more; try these instead:

Can't install plugins as non-root:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=123315

When plugin installation fails, there's no error message:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237573

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040706 Firefox/0.9.1

[12] Submitted by: Briden on Saturday 14th August 2004 at 13:39 -0400

So where are the plugin files in FireFox 0.8?

Not physically where do you locate them, but how do you use them afterwards? I've just unzipped the files to: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins (on windows obviously)

Then i restarted the browser and was expecting to see the search bar, but there is nothing. where do i access the search?

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

[13] Submitted by: Chris on Monday 27th September 2004 at 13:20 -0400

To use the search fuctionality in Firefox, you must right-click on the Navigation Toolbar and choose "Customise." You will then see all of the optional widgets that you can place on the Toolbar. One of them should be called Search, and will look like an input field. Drag it onto the Toolbar (I like mine to the right of the Address field). Voila. Input a search string and hit enter. Your search appears in the browser window.

BTW, to change search engines, left-click on the icon in the Search field. You should get a drop down list.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

[14] Submitted by: zcrayfish@clis.com on Monday 4th October 2004 at 00:54 -0400

I need help with the script to install search engines... I have 3 search plugins and I can't figure out how to get the script working

Go see my page at;
http://zcrayfish.augurtech.com/searchplugins.htm

please contact me at my email address (above) or aim (crayfishzach01)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1

[15] Submitted by: Luke Stodola on Monday 11th October 2004 at 07:57 -0400

Needs TWO locations: mycroft (and other extensions as well) should go in two possible locations:
- the system directory (where Firefox is installed, available to everybody, modifiable by root only (or whatever the user has set)
- a user directory (~/.firefox/extensions or whatever), which the user has rw access to, and can install plugins which only affect her

Would it be hard to make firefox check both locations?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041005 Firefox/0.10.1 (Ubuntu)

[16] Submitted by: Moha on Tuesday 12th October 2004 at 15:39 -0400

Hello!

I just had some trouble installing search plugins for Firefox 0.9.3 under windows. I just post this to those who experience the same problem:
When I clicked on the plugin, the prompt "Would you like to install" appeared, but the plugin still wasn't there in the search bar.
I've checked and there were no searchplugins directory in the main folder of firefox.
So, if the search plugin doesn't appear, you should check if the searchplugins dir exist, and if it's not, then create it.
After I've created the dir, the plugin install worked fine.

Regards,
Moha

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; hu-HU; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

[17] Submitted by: kozaki on Tuesday 23rd November 2004 at 13:44 -0500

Thanks a lot to mat @ mycroft & wouter for giving some tips that may help me getting searchPlugins works

As pointed out by Luke Stodola on Monday 11th October 2004 :
Needs TWO locations: mycroft (and other extensions as well) should go in two possible locations:
- the system directory (where Firefox is installed, available to everybody, modifiable by root only (or whatever the user has set)
- a user directory (~/.firefox/extensions or whatever), which the user has rw access to, and can install plugins which only affect her

Would it be hard to make firefox check both locations?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr-FR; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0

[18] Submitted by: kozaki on Tuesday 23rd November 2004 at 13:48 -0500

BTW,
- Links for bug report are good. I used the first one.
- That link for searchplugins archive is no good anymore. It's actually that one : http://downloads.mozdev.org/mycroft/allplugins.tar.gz

Please note that the phrase is quite confusing (see the date... :
"You can download all plugins as a .tar.gz archive (0kB - last modified 1969-12-31, it will open with WinZip and other compression programs)."

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr-FR; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0

[19] Submitted by: Brad on Tuesday 25th January 2005 at 05:51 -0500

There are 2 ways to order the search engines in the drop down menu......

1. This works for ordering search engines in the drop down, although Google and Yahoo (if you have them) stay at the top and are not affected by the renaming of the others. Go to your search plugins folder and open each .src and image file and rename them with a number at the front. For example... 00dictionary.src and 00dictionary.png then 01ebay.src and 01ebay.gif would list dictionary.com as the first entry in the drop down after Google and Yahoo then ebay would be after that and so on.

2. you can go to about:config and search for browser.search.order and you will see that string with a .1 and maybe a .2 and so on. add the string with a .3 and so on and give it a value (e.g. UPS Tracking that you want).

Restart FF.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 (ax)

[20] Submitted by: Luigi Viggiano on Tuesday 22nd March 2005 at 18:59 -0500

I created a plugin, but it's not working.

Anyone can help me please?

Thanks.
Luigi.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1

[21] Submitted by: Luigi Viggiano on Tuesday 22nd March 2005 at 19:00 -0500

ups! I forgot the link where you can test it:
http://www.jugtorino.it/newwiki/jsp/Wiki?MozillaFirefox

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1

[22] Submitted by: Luigi Viggiano on Tuesday 22nd March 2005 at 19:12 -0500

My Email address (for eventual help about last 2 posts)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1

[23] Submitted by: Luigi Viggiano on Tuesday 22nd March 2005 at 19:13 -0500

Sorry (forgot the email address), I'm very tired at this time :-(
mail: lviggiano at tiscali dot it

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1

[24] Submitted by: Andrea M on Thursday 7th April 2005 at 14:47 -0400

I am trying to write a search plugin that requires empty hidden inputs, that is, the url has to have things like ?ed=&jd=&Query=myquery

If I include them in the plugin like this:

the plugin doesn't send the empty missing fields (i.e. its query doesn't include ...ed=&jd=&..., and the search fails.

Any clue?
Thanks in advance

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2

[25] Submitted by: andrea m on Thursday 7th April 2005 at 14:50 -0400

Sorry the commment 24 above did not show the input tags because it doesn't allow html, here they are
input name="ed" value=""
input name="jd" value=""

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2

[26] Submitted by: bg on Sunday 8th May 2005 at 04:26 -0400

ive written a plugin for brainboost search. It appears in the search bar but when i hit enter it does not produce the required url.
it worked fine in firefox 0.8. i recently upgraded to 1.0.3

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

[27] Submitted by: bg on Thursday 12th May 2005 at 07:24 -0400

to clarify it does nothing when i click enter.the cursor remains in the search bar and no url is produced.This happens to all plugins i have written. The plugins distributed with firefox and those downloaded from mycroft work well.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

[28] Submitted by: Jason Farquhar on Thursday 18th August 2005 at 19:36 -0400

For linux users a quick (buy insecure) hack to get search plugins to work is simply to make the searchplugins directory world writeable, e.g. as root
/# chmod -w /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.4/searchplugins

or wherever you installed firefox.

Of course a much better solution as mentioned before would be for Firefox to search the current users plugins in somewhere like ~/.firefox/user/searchplugins as well as the system set.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050513 Fedora/1.0.4-1.3.1 Firefox/1.0.4

[29] Submitted by: Oz on Thursday 13th October 2005 at 04:16 -0400

Unreliable installer script. Create the script I cat below then su root and execute it with the parameters you can see in the status bar of firefox when pointing on a searchplugin install link. ("Unreliable" because it uses an URL that may change in the future.)

oz@destroyer ~ $ cat /usr/local/bin/firefox_addEngine
#! /bin/bash
cd /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/searchplugins/
wget http://mycroft.mozdev.org/nowrapper/submit-install.php/v/$4/$1.src
wget http://mycroft.mozdev.org/nowrapper/submit-install.php/i/$4/$1.$2

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050906 Firefox/1.0.6

[30] Submitted by: PeterB on Monday 30th January 2006 at 15:01 -0500

With reference to post #19 by Brad:

The #2 solution in that post (via about:config) looks rather elegant, however I didn't get it to work (yes, I did restart FF).
I'm using FF 1.5 on Mac OS X 10.3.9.

Did I miss anything?

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

[31] Submitted by: Steve LaRocque on Tuesday 7th March 2006 at 00:43 -0500

Is there any way to detect through javascript whether a particular search plug-in (identified in any manner) is already installed? I'd like to have an "install the plugin" link show up ONLY when the plugin isn't already installed. Thanks all.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

[32] Submitted by: saperavi-online on Monday 20th March 2006 at 19:24 -0500

Umm. I have just installed a search plugin using
sidebar.addSearchEngine() function, i.e. as described in
the "installing from Server" section.

As a result there was a directory `searchplugins' created under my profile containing just the '.src' and the `.gif' files.

One might as well just create a `searchplugins' directory under Mozilla profile and copy the plugin files into this directory straight away and restart the browser. Should work. Must be an answer to the first
post #1.

Just in case, here is the full listing of the directory:

[bash-3.0 ~]$ ls -l ~/.mozilla/firefox/rjfcps29.default/searchplugins/
total 16
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chubarik games 1076 Mar 21 00:54 google-co-uk.gif
-rw-rw-r-- 1 chubarik games 623 Mar 21 00:54 google-co-uk.src

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060124 Firefox/1.5.0.1

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060124 Firefox/1.5.0.1

[33] Submitted by: CyanFOX on Thursday 30th March 2006 at 12:51 -0500

okay you used to be able to download all of the plugins in a nifty compressed tar file but i cannot seem to find it any more: may i please reaquest some help finding it again, thanks so much!

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915

[34] Submitted by: Charles at Mycroft on Friday 31st March 2006 at 12:43 -0500

Due to the way plugins are now stored, it's not as easy to do this any more. There is a zip I created earlier this month at http://downloads.mozdev.org/mycroft/ which may help you? Email me if there's something you're particularly after...

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

[35] Submitted by: Leandro Brun on Thursday 11th May 2006 at 07:00 -0400

The correct location for Mozilla Search Plugins when installing manually (for Mozilla Firefox 1.5+/Windows XP) should now read:

C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\.default\searchplugins\

where (without the 's) should be the username under which you are currently logged in and is a sequence of alpha-numeric characters.

Note that this will add the search plugin to 's Firefox instance and nobody elses which is the recommended method and will work whether you have administrative rights on the system or not.

System-wide searchplugins (that can be used/viewed by any Mozilla Firefox users) should be installed into:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins

For future reference, if this changes later on, and you cannot find your 'searchplugins' directory or folder, or if Mozilla Firefox has been installed into a non-standard directory/folder, try performing a system-wide search or find on the word 'searchplugins' and see where it has moved to. This should work at least until Mycroft folks change the actual name from 'searchplugins' to something else...

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3

[36] Submitted by: Leandro Brun on Thursday 11th May 2006 at 07:06 -0400

The correct location for Mozilla Search Plugins when installing manually (for Mozilla Firefox 1.5+/Windows XP) should now read:

C:\Documents and Settings\$USER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\$PROFILE.default\searchplugins\

where $USERNAME should be the username under which you are currently logged in and $PROFILE is a sequence of alpha-numeric characters.

Note that this will add the search plugin to $USERNAME's Firefox instance and nobody elses on the system which is the recommended method and will work whether you have administrative rights or not.

System-wide searchplugins (that can be used/viewed by any Mozilla Firefox users on the system) should be installed into:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\

For future reference, if this changes later on, and you cannot find your 'searchplugins' directory or folder, or if Mozilla Firefox has been installed into a non-standard directory/folder, try performing a system-wide search or find on the word 'searchplugins' to try and discover where it has moved to. This should work at least until Mycroft folks change the actual name from 'searchplugins' to something else...

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3

[37] Submitted by: hallaroo on Thursday 18th May 2006 at 17:31 -0400

I'm using FF 1.5.0.3. Yesterday morning I opened it only to find that all my bookmarks were gone and, no matter what I do, I have no search engines in the pulldown menu and can't add any. I checked C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\, and the search engines that came in the 1.5.0.3 download are in there, but the browser doesn't seem to know it. Help. Please.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3

[38] Submitted by: Will on Tuesday 30th May 2006 at 16:04 -0400

It would be very useful for those who prefer to do a manual installation, if there were an obvious way to download just the plugin files for a particular engine rather than the whole 3MB zip for all engines.

Even without this, your site is appreciated.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

[39] Submitted by: Charles at Mycroft on Wednesday 31st May 2006 at 12:08 -0400

Re #38

This is possible if not easily discoverable...
Try, for example, http://mycroft.mozdev.org/install.php/9484/leo.src
and http://mycroft.mozdev.org/install.php/9484/leo.gif

You will need to replace the number and filename according to the plugin - if you hover over the install link you should be able to get these details.

(By the way, the zip is not updated frequently - it was compiled to help with some Firefox 2 testing)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3

[40] Submitted by: Joe on Thursday 15th June 2006 at 23:11 -0400

Same problem as #37, and happened at the same time.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4

[41] Submitted by: Charles at Mycroft on Friday 16th June 2006 at 12:06 -0400

Joe,
See: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Search_engines_disappear_from_Search_Bar

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4

[42] Submitted by: Assaf on Wednesday 18th April 2007 at 00:38 -0700

How do I modify a search engine?

Specifically: I want the Google option to search in google.co.il instead of google.com, since the existing search is redirected anyway. No google.xml file in my searchplugins directory, strange. (There are some other xml files there, like wikipedia)

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3

[43] Submitted by: Pastisman on Thursday 19th April 2007 at 00:28 -0700

Hi,
Don't know how it is on Linux but on Windows you have two directories with searchplugins *.xml files, the one in mozilla installation path and another one in your profile (on Windows it looks like "C:\Documents and Settings\...\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\...\searchplugins". I think that if you have suppressed and reinstalled the plugin it might be in the second one.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3