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by joaomsa 2955 days ago
While I've never experienced conflict issues with bookmark sync, one pet peeve of mine is how their sync implementation has never supported syncing search engines.

I mean proper OpenSearch support, different from using keyboard bookmarks with %s as a hack, since you actually get proper autocomplete.

In fact that whole situation there is just a mess, no proper way to use sites that implemented OpenSearch from the awesomebar like the Tab to search in chrome's omnibar.
1 comments
yoklov 2955 days ago
Historically this has been a little tricky to add due to some peculiarities with addons. That shouldn’t be an issue anymore, although I don’t think anybody’s jumping at implementing the bug, presumably since it seems like it will require walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting search contracts (for example, it becomes tricky when you consider that search contracts are by location but users could have devices in multiple locations. There are several other headaches around this too).

We do sync bookmark keywords FWIW, which can be used as a sort of search, but it’s a bit indiscoverable and not the same as syncing settings like your default search engine.

(I work on firefox sync)

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joaomsa 2955 days ago
I did mention using bookmark keyword searches as hack to get sync, but I'm talking about proper support for syncing user registered OpenSearch[1] providers (and any user configured keyword shortcuts for them)

As of now you can add an OpenSearch[1] provider in Firefox using the javascript api `window.external.AddSearchProvider(engineURL)` where engineURL is the XML file description of the search engine like this one for IMDb search:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/imdb/images/imdbsearc...

This is the method the Mycroft[2] project uses, which Firefox recommends. Chrome though, besides also supporting that API, looks for a search meta tag in a page's head after you visit it liking to the same OpenSearch provider xml

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/imdb/images/imdbsearc... title="IMDb">

In Chrome, after you visit their home page with that metadata it's registered as a provider so once you start typing Imdb in the omnibox, you see an indication to press 'Tab' in the right corner of the omnibox, and it switches to searching imdb instead. Even providing autocomplete if the search provider supports it.

Firefox could make registering these more discoverable from the UI (adding via a page action as an example at least?)

[1] http://www.opensearch.org/Home [2] http://mycroftproject.com/

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