"Your default search engine has changed."
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I noticed a message yesterday: "Your default search engine has changed. Google is no longer available as the default search engine in Abrowser. DuckDuckGo HTML is now your default search engine. To change to another default search engine, go to settings." Learn more
I am happy with this change, but just out of curiosity I tried to switch back to Google and couldn't figure out how to, I think because Google doesn't support OpenSearch which is kind of funny.
The "Learn more" link goes to a page that doesn't exist though. I guess it's not that big of a deal that the link is broken; probably most people have already dismissed the popup if they got it. I think it would be good if that page explained why the search engines were removed though. Since I don't actually know why Google was removed, I don't think I should write the page. I speculate that it's because Google Search pages include nonfree nontrivial JavaScript, while DuckDuckGo's "html" version only includes trivial (according to Trisquel devs, not to LibreJS) optional JavaScript.
Does anyone know why Google and other search engines were removed? Does anyone have a link to the discussion where this was decided?
To be clear I am not saying the change is bad, I just want the reason to be documented in the "Learn more" link.
I had a different experience: I was using https://html.duckduckgo.com as the default search engine but also received the message regarding that engine no longer being available! Ecosia was the proposed change. It sends proprietary JavaScript to execute, according to GNU LibreJS. I ended up installing https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite and I still cannot add the HTML version. When I try to do so, clicking the icon with the + in the search field, an error window, named "Install Error" says:
Abrowser could not install the search plugin from “https://duckduckgo.com/opensearch_html_v2.xml” because an engine with the same name already exists.
I have tried removing the Lite version and restarting Abrowser, but the error remains.
Go to Settings - Search, and hit the "Restore Default Search Engines" button - see if that helps you.
DuckDuckGo HTML has reappeared and is the default... although I have not clicked "Restore Default Search Engines"! I have restarted the system though. Wikipedia in English (I had it both in French and English) disappeared from the list of search engines too. The rest has remained. That is weird...
I am surprised to hear that you saw Ecosia as an option. I saw that also, but I thought it was something left over from me installing the Ecosia extension years ago (back when the search engine didn't require JavaScript).
When I make a new profile I see DuckDucGo HTML, Ecosia (seems to require nonfree JS), Qwant (seems to require nonfree JS), Trisquel, Trisquel Packages, Wikipedia as the search engine options.
Go about:config, search browser.search.update, set false.
it will never happen again
This last update, while we kept the usual search engines it uses a new setup introduced by Firefox in v128, when we had the Google search engine issue.
We were holding this change 'til it got ready, which is this v130, there was a invitation to test it, and a brief discussion on the development list, further releases will follow the same process, so we can confirm that no issues are introduced in new releases.
It will require more time and testing, aka slower releases, but should give us a better tested release and less issues by introduced features via upstream.
So you are welcome to join this process.
Regards.