Please return old search bar

Firefox Development
#13

Hi All, yes, the workflow of the classic search bar changed. Actually, it changed in Firefox 34, but many of you were rolling that back through one means or another until Firefox 57 made that impossible.*

I don’t expect this post to make any new fans, but I wanted to point out that you can get suggestions from your intended new search engine with an extra click:

Set new default search engine on OLD BAR:

  • drop the list
  • click the icon

Set new default search engine on NEW BAR:

  • drop the list
  • right-click the icon
  • click “Set As Default Search Engine”

To address issues with lack of text labels for the icons, you can use custom style rules. This video illustrates:

My page to generate rules for a userChrome.css file:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/search-bar-names.html

* By “impossible” I mean without injecting old bar code into Firefox using an XBL binding or Autoconfig. E.g., https://github.com/Aris-t2/ClassicThemeRestorer/

#14

Is there a more informative link for the work-in-progress?

#15

Thanks for your suggestion, but the main problem is not what can I achieve by using extra right-click, but what is happening when I use left-click like I used to do for almost 10 years. It suddenly changes the page I’m looking at - unacceptable.

The new behavior is the only reason I’m still using FF 56. It’s ridiculous and I cannot imagine what is the reason for this change. If I want to search for something, the first decision I’m making is WHERE I will do it, and then WHAT will be the exact phrase. Like in real life: FIRST you choose the proper dictionary, and THEN you are looking for the desired word.
Quantum is turning this upside down :frowning:

#16

Sorry for offtopic but is seems to me that developers just do not care. Some software architect or even non-technical guy decided that new approach is “modern”, “looks like apple/google/microsoft” and thus is “better” and they introduced the change that broken user experience of millions. Like in other software products, doesn’t matter proprietary or open-source.

#17

This change was introduced in Firefox 34 in October 2015. There was an internal preference to revert it in Firefox 34-42. Then there were add-ons for Firefox 43-56. We are very, very far down the road now, and I am not aware of any interest in disturbing the behaviors established by millions of other users during the past three years.

#18

That’s true. It’s also true, that before Quantum we had a choice, now it’s gone.

Does anyone analyzed statistics on how many people were using browser.search.showOneOffButtons?
Does anyone analyzed statistics on how many people were using Classic Theme Restorer to get “old style” search bar?
I’m afraid, that someone decided that mobile users with touch screens are now more important, so we break the experience for many people - just because we can. And finally: does anyone have statistics on how many people are really using the search bar in the new form? How many people treat it as a really useful tool and how many just ignore its existence since it started to be useless…

#19

+1

Absolutely agree with previous author. And IMHO nowadays the only reason to use search bar is for users who explicitly disabled search from address bar (by privacy reasons). But I suspect there are no much such users, most just use address bar for search purposes and get rid of search bar.

#20

The choice was to use an extension that could inject completely new code into Firefox’s user interface. And extensions can no longer do that.

There are still hacks if you search for them. But there is no guarantee they will continue to work so I don’t promote them.

The search bar is not shown in new installs starting in Firefox 57; it has to be enabled on the Options/Preferences page or added using Customize. I hope it remains available because it’s convenient for old timers, but further development seems doubtful. The focus is on the address bar these days.

#21

Hi,

yeah - once again I am looking for a solution to get the old well working search solution for firefox that everybody I know liked. Now I read that it was pure friendliness that we users were allowed to still use this way we were used and liked just the way it was.

Instead I would really like to see a solution to get back what simply worked.

remember: if it ain’t broke - don’t fix it.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to interpret the existence of addons like that? I am pretty sure everyone who did not use the addon just did not know of its existence or was not able to install it

Finally: how to get back the old search now?

regards

1 Like
#22

I only registered here to say to you:
Please bring the working Searchbar back!
The actual one is simply BS, and I’m starting to hate the new firefox version so incredible much.
I’m really thinking about to change the browser, because working with this is no fun.

#23

I am another user who found Old Search in a separate searchbar a lot more practical. I used it up until FF63 with CustomCSSforFx. Combining jscher2000’s suggestions and the pre-built CSS options in CustomCSSforFx, I could get a reasonably good simulation of Old Search.

But it’s not perfect and I still don’t like it. At least the default search engine icon display should be re-implemented (although I won’t hold my breath expecting it).

I also take issue with the attitude of developers, even helpful ones in this thread who are giving useful advice. Even if there are tweaks to restore old functionality, users shouldn’t be forced to do so. For relatively tech-savvy people like me, the issue is just the time I have to waste to find & correctly implement those tweaks. But for a lot of other users, especially older people, even just to find new options/tweaks and/or re-learning everything every two years is just too difficult. Developers don’t seem to realise that not only aren’t most users geeks, even most users who customize software aren’t geeks.

With Firefox, for me, the perverse situation is that I can’t switch to other browsers, because the changes in FF are aping those other browsers. SO I have to use whatever customisation is still available to get back old features like coloured menu icons.

1 Like
#24

Firefox developers should stop overestimating the suppossed need or desirability of the one-time search (the ability of sending your search to a different site without making that site your default search engine) because we normally do more than 2 consecutive searches from a site when using the one-time search feature (usually 3 or more), and doing searches this way or changing the default search engine with the new-style search bar (in order to get autocompletion of search suggestions from the site you need them) is actually tedious compared to the way of changing the default engine with the previous interface (up to Firefox 34), so Firefox should restore both the previous/“classic” style search bar (I guess almost nobody will miss the one-time search feature if it disappears) and the internal preference to choose between both styles for the search bar, and keep them forever for the sake of both desired functionality and customization.

2 Likes
#25

Just happened to come across this thread.

Idk. if this will work for everybody here, but I make use of the keywords which can be assigned to each search engine in preferences. Let’s say ‘g’ is assigned to google. If you want to search from address bar and your default search engine is not google, all you have to do is type ‘g’ Space-key and then your search term. If enabled, you will also get search suggestions. The same goes for all the engines I tried it with.

That is actually a pretty neat feature which I have come to like. And possibly could make up for the missing search bar - for some people - I think.

But in general (unfortunately) I agree with most of you previous posters. Idk. who makes the decisions or how they are made at mozilla (therefore I won’t blame anybody) but I also had some very hard times adjusting to new implementations. (I still mourn the old address-bar dropdown which showed the blue Urls just below the page title and not after).

Don’t want to change the subject though…

#27

It is a shame what happened to Mozilla Firefox.
What’s the point in having for eg. separated search bar, if it uses same search engine as the address bar and you cannot set different for both!

What kind of m***n programmed it like that?

#28

100% agreed that the old search bar layout was massively, massively superior.

Having a simple list of search engines with their corresponding labels beside them was infinitely clearer than relying on a grid of tiny icons without any text.

@jscher2000

I am not aware of any interest in disturbing the behaviors established by millions of other users during the past three years.

That’s exactly what Mozilla developers do, though. They implement features, leave them for years, then suddenly - and without warning - totally obliterate them or change them completely.

1 Like
#29

I agree with absolutely everything you said. Mozilla’s development processes are just insane. “Change for the sake of change” should be their motto. The insistent need to copy what other browsers are doing (or more accurately, what they’re not doing) is absolutely maddening.

Honestly, for me, version 3 was where Firefox hit its peak. The layout and GUI was almost entirely customisable. Version numbers weren’t rocketing up by factors of 100 every 3 weeks.

Then the race to keep up with Chrome’s equally stupid version numbers began, and so did Firefox’s fall from grace. Features changed and disappeared. I remember an update where they just totally reassigned a frequently-used hotkey (Ctrl+E or Ctrl+L, if I remember correctly) to a completely different function entirely. So anyone who’d been using that hotkey for years (like me) just had to “deal with it” (it was eventually changed back, by some god-sent miracle of common sense).

If that isn’t a middle finger to the user, I don’t know what is.

Now the obsession with minimalism and getting rid of modal/dialog windows and shoe-horning as much useless semi-spyware crap as possible into the browser (see: Pocket, Experiments, etc.) has gone beyond all reason.

And let’s not even mention the loss of the ENTIRE extension ecosystem when changing to Quantum. How many hundreds of thousands of man hours were flushed down the toilet in favour of crippled functionality which has not even remotely begun to catch up with the ability of old extensions?

As a developer, losing Firebug is something I still lament on a daily basis. Sometimes I actually use a version of Firefox 40 just so I can still use Firebug, because Firefox Developer Tools simply sucks balls (you can’t even resize the width of the columns in its GUI, FFS!)

I yearn for a return to the “good old days” where browsers were actually controlled by their users and not the other way around.

1 Like
#30

After this topic, recent “issue” with extensions, deprecating live bookmarks it seems to me that Mozilla switched to the way of most modern IT companies (I’m a software engineer with 14 years experience) – hire noobs (who switched to IT from non-IT in favor of money), place non-competent non-IT guys to management, break everything (just because it is modern, or “Apple/Google” did the same) and utilize end-users as a free alpha-testers. For many years there were no significant problems with Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, but now I’m not confident, what they will break (intentionally or accidentally) next – may be bookmarks at all?

I’d like to get rid of buggy broken Firefox and remove this traitor software from all my devices, but unfortunately there is no FOSS alternative.

#31

I’m probably one of few that actually doesn’t mind the change to the new search functionality.

I am someone that doesn’t like change. So much that I’ve used my own CSS to modify the browser interface seeing as how CTR is no longer an option.

Despite myself also liking the older implementation, I didn’t really take such an immediate dependence to it such that I installed add-ons to revert it.

I did loathe having to adjust to the changes, but I did. Each iteration seemed to bring its own pros and cons.

What we’ve come to now, for me, is the most straight forward and most versatile implementation from those that I remember experiencing.

I very much liked being able to search multiple sites with the same query but at the same time found it time consuming. I also didn’t like having to click the thin list item just to get to the search to run. I never had an issue with default search engine so the current implementation works fine for me (despite not being as flexible).

As it is, I’m not likely to run a query on multiple search engines. I usually just stick to one and if I need to, I’ll just type it out again to search on the other. It’s not a big deal for me.

If anything, I definitely click on things less. I like the way it is now as it’s just ONE location for me to search. It’s only supposed to do one thing: SEARCH.

Do I miss the previous implementations? Sure.

Do I acknowledge that the current implementation also carries its own pros and cons? Yes, I do.

No solution was perfect for me. While the current design is definitely more “modern” and the click-zones are more user-friendly, it isn’t as customizable as it should be.

Also, I have no clue if Syncing to my Mozilla account syncs the engines I have saved.

For the record, I would wholeheartedly approve of keeping ONE design and ONLY ever that ONE design.

I too don’t see the point in changing out something that obviously works just to be different—which is a business decision, not a user-based one.

Nobody here cares how Firefox looks or performs compared to Chrome. I never had a problem with how Firefox operated before 57/Quantum and I still don’t.

Wanna know why?

'Cause the only damn thing I give two stones about is customization. That’s it.

#32

I’m a keyboard focussed user. What’s really nagging me with the new search bar is the fact that it wraps when scrolling through the list of search engines using the Arrow Up/Down keys.

In earlier versions, when I wanted to reach a search engine down the list, I just held down the Arrow Down key until the end of the list was reached (in less than half a second) and hit the Arrow Up key as many times as required to reach my desired search engine. I was so used to it that I didn’t even read my search engine selection. I knew, “hold Arrow Down key, press Arrow Up key twice” was Amazon. Same for reaching search engines up the list.

I was quite shocked to see that the scrolling mechanism now wraps from the end right up to the beginning of the list and vice versa. Now I actually have to READ which search engine I want to use.

This is a true usability degration. Things that once were fast to use have become cumbersome now.

Isn’t there a configuration option available to stop Firefox from wrapping when scrolling through the list of search engines using the Arrow keys?

1 Like
#33

I’m a Firefox user since 2.0. The new search bar is human abomination. And this is one of the reasons why I still spit on quantum and stick with Waterfox.

“What were they thinking!?” - nerd

1 Like