where did the search settings go

[mcdavis]

In one of the newsgroup posting about add-on signings, Mike Connor said:

Search settings moved out of preferences last year to combat this, but
add-ons can do anything the UI can do. Home page and new tab will move to
that model this year.

Where did the search settings move to? How are they represented now?

[smsmith]

Tools -> Options -> Search?

[mcdavis]

I thought he was talking about some change in the underlying persistant storage, like it was no longer stored in about:config/prefs.js and was moved to some other kind of storage on disk. If he were talking about only the UI part, I'd consider a new pane in the Options window to be "in preferences", not "out of preferences", so I guess he doesn't mean that. But I don't know.

[patrickjdempsey]

Instead of storing the selected search engine in a preference in prefs.js, they migrated it to search-metadata.json. If you are using the factory default (which varies based on your locale) then the selection is not stored. If you have a different setting for the default, then the engine is stored in search-metadata.json with a hash value based on the directory structure of the profile. This makes the value non-portable and it means you can no longer change the search engine at all from the profile, it can only be done by the user through the Options interface, or through an API which Mozilla presumably has flagged via AMO reviews. The Addons Validator and the future Signing mechanism will no doubt block any extension attempting to change the default search engine. I guess Yahoo had some pretty tall stipulations that came with their money.

Both the new search engine scheme and signed addons seem like they are going to hurt deployed installs... not sure if there are workarounds available for corporations.

[mcdavis]

Thanks, great answer.