Search is a central concept in the GNOME user experience. It provides quick navigation and shortcuts to recently used documents, places and software.
A search provider is used by an application to expose such data to the users via the GNOME Shell search screen. As for Web browsers currently only Gnome Web (Epiphany) have integrated this feature.
This long awaited feature finally arrives with the latest Firefox update in Fedora. Although there’s an upstream effort to ship it in Mozilla official builds, Mozilla builds are missing a generic way to install the GNOME Shell integration system. This explain why this specific feature has to be shipped by particular distributions.
Firefox search provider is launched when an active Firefox instance is running. It gets live data from user profile. An offline search provider was also considered but it’s not yet implemented right due to SQL database locks at Firefox profiles.
To get web search results on top of your search you may also need to activate Firefox in the search configuration. To do so go to Settings -> Search, find Firefox and move it on top of the list.
Now you can use the Gnome search facility to search the web.
Felix Pojtinger
Awesome feature! This will surely be one more reason to love GNOME’s already awesome search feature.
Marcio
Thanks by more this feature!
Now I will be love when Silverblue came pre-installed by Lenovo, Dell, HP and others vendors.
Nico
It doesn’t work on my laptop. Package is the correct one, and I’ve enabled it on gnome’search setting. Also, firefox is opened. No way to get results 🙁
Clark
not impresed, pull down has
Google
Bing
Amazon
DuckDuckGo
eBay
Twitter
Wikipedia(en)
but no other!
Linux — 5.3.16-300.fc31.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Dec 13 17:59:04 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
firefox-71.0-15.fc31.x86_64
Hrabe
It doesn’t work for me either. The package is the correct one.
Andreas Behn
The firefox-search-provider donit work for me.
journal: “Invalid result meta returned from search provider firefox.desktop”, “Received error from DBus search provider firefox.desktop: Gio.IOErrorEnum”
firefox 71.0-15.fc31
fedora 31
Martin Stransky
Please file a bug for it at bugzilla.redhat.com, I’ll investigate that.
bhavin192
I noticed this feature two days ago, I thought it was there and I never noticed it. Nice to know more about it 🙂
Ahmed
I have disabled it directly after seen my history appear on search. 😀
It’s nice features but maybe not all of us want it by default.
Ondrej
Well, as people have access to your profile, your secrets are no longer secrets anymore. I think turning it by default on is not an issue