[KaiRo] Search Bar and Search Engine Manager

[Philip Chee]

[KaiRo] Search Bar and Search Engine Manager

When I added OpenSearch support for SeaMonkey 2.1 a few months ago, there was one thing I knew wasn't complete: We had no management UI for removing OpenSearch engines again, or even setting search keywords. Also, there was this request that had come up rarely, but still repeatedly, that a "search bar" in Firefox style should be available to add to the toolbar - even if not present there by default.

And after porting all the OpenSearch integration code, this was not incredibly hard any more, it was mostly copying over the Firefox search bar and engine manager code (the latter is available from the former, so they're slightly tied together) and then fitting it into SeaMonkey (and even cleaning them up a little, which I will backport to Firefox again).

And this is how it looks in my test build (and nightlies starting tomorrow) with the search bar customized in:



Of course, as stated before, this additional box is hidden by default, but a right click on any free area in the toolbars and selecting "Customize..." will allow you to drag it into the active set.

Today, for the official sixth anniversary of the SeaMonkey project (see last year's anniversary article), it fits well that this patch did land on the comm-central tree and very probably marks the last major work I land for SeaMonkey as I'm transitioning to new challenges.

I'd like to thank everyone who has patiently reviewed all those large porting patches I did, trying to get some of the heavy lifting done to bring the SeaMonkey suite into the 21st century - which I think the upcoming 2.1 release and its currently available betas do and will demonstrate beautifully.

It's been a pleasure and I'm happy I could contribute a number of important pieces of work to this still thriving and now even reasonably modern Internet suite with bleeding edge support of web innovations like a lot of HTML5 and CSS3. Who would have thought 6 years ago that this project would come to where it is today?

Entry written by KaiRo and posted on March 10th, 2011 23:13

[patrickjdempsey]

It's nice to have the option of having a Firefox-like search bar. Am I correct in remembering that SM 2.1 will not have search results in the Search Sidebar anymore? That was a pretty cool feature.

[Philip Chee]

It's nice to have the option of having a Firefox-like search bar. Am I correct in remembering that SM 2.1 will not have search results in the Search Sidebar anymore? That was a pretty cool feature.

1. We need a way of scraping the search results.
2. The old Sherlock engines allows you to define how to scrape search results. Sadly most third party sherlock engines don't specify this (including those created by the mycroft.mozdev.org search engine creator wizard). So even with the old Search Service, if you have some third party search plugins installed you might not get sidebar results.
3. The OpenSearch specification does allow you to request that search results be returned in ATOM/RSS/XML which would be ideal. Unfortunately the Firefox/Toolkit Search engine service doesn't currently support sending out search requests with those parameters.

Phil

[patrickjdempsey]

LOL, of course they don't... why would they support anything they don't use even if users and other services might want to? It's too bad though. I guess there's not a way to use both types of plugin? Perhaps separated into two different categories in the drop-down list? Awhile back I worked on a little HTML page that uses the mobile sites of different search engines to show search results in the sidebar... sort of similar to the Netscape 9 sidebar browser... maybe something like that could be used?

[Rob_S]

So will there not be any way to get a list of search results, where you can click from one to the other and the resulting pages appear in the main window? Boy, am I going to miss that.

Sidebar multi-engine search works well for me, after mucking about with the plugins, I get google, altavista, yahoo, sevensearch, ask, and a few others.

Then, I can scan up and down the list and keep trying different links. Surely this is a core feature...

[Philip Chee]

LOL, of course they don't... why would they support anything they don't use even if users and other services might want to? It's too bad though. I guess there's not a way to use both types of plugin? Perhaps separated into two different categories in the drop-down list? Awhile back I worked on a little HTML page that uses the mobile sites of different search engines to show search results in the sidebar... sort of similar to the Netscape 9 sidebar browser... maybe something like that could be used?

The Firefox OpenSearch Engine Manager detects installed Sherlock plugins and converts them internally into the OpenSearch format. Of course the scrape syntax is dropped.
Also the old scraping code was written in C++ and dates back to the Netscape era. Nobody these days wants to touch it with a barge pole.

http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmisc.html#conquery
The ConQuery extension appears to be able to be able to use both. It uses its own engine but the code is pretty gnarly since it supports Firefox all the way back to 1.5 (I think. I got a headache reading the code).

Using the mobile search pages: Not too sure how practicable this is. It needs to be maintenance free from our point of view since users can in theory install any of thousands of search plugins.

Phil

[patrickjdempsey]

Yeah the mobile search method is definitely not maintenance free as mine was recently broken by all of the changes Google went through recently.