Mozilla Tip Number… Uh… One!

The following is a tip for anyone using Mozilla Firefox 1.0 (although it may work in other versions of Firefox, or other Mozilla-based browsers).

By default, Firefox 1.0 places two search engines at the top of the list of installed searchbox plugins: Google and Yahoo.  Now, personally, I can't stand this, if only because I find it makes more sense to look for the Google plugin in the same spot as my other Google ones (Images, News, &c.).  Unfortunately, the documentation doesn't mention how to turn this off.  So here's a brief (non-technical, or as non-technical as I can manage) explanation of how to do so:

Type about:config in the address bar and hit enter. Enter search in the filter and hit enter; you should see a number of results, but we're only interested in two of them. If you want all of your entries to be sorted alphabetically, modify the values for browser.search.order.1 and browser.search.order.2 to blank strings (double-clicking on the entry brings up the modify dialog).  However, if you want to display the search engines in your own personal order, then modify the value to be the name of the engine as displayed in the search box's drop-down list. (For example: If I wanted Wikipedia to be the first engine displayed, then I'd change browser.search.order.1 to have a value of 'Wikipedia (EN)', as that's the plugin name.)  If you want to change the position of more than just 2 engines, then right click and create a new string called browser.search.engine.3 for the third entry, .4 for the fourth, &c.

One day I may get around to making an extension to let you customise this, but right now I can't be bothered.  (Thanks goes to Gnerma, from the Mozillazine forums, who helped me find the appropriate settings that needed to be modified.)