My Custom Firefox Search Plugins

Have you ever wanted to add your own search engines to the search bar in Firefox? Well there are plugins that will do this for you, but I find that it’s more fun to create them yourself. If you go to the folder C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxsearchplugins, you will find an XML file for each search engine. If you open one of these in a text editor, you can probably customize a copy of one of the existing files to meet your needs.

The only tricky part is the icon. It needs to be converted to a base 64 text string. Base64 Online does a great job of doing this for you. All you have to do is upload your image (often found at www.[whatever website].com/favicon.ico), and Base64 Online will convert the *.ico file into Base64.

Here are two of mine: (you can right-click > ‘Save Link As’ into the above folder if you don’t want to do the work yourself) UIUC People Search Song Lyrics (via SongMeanings.com)

See Also

• Google Chrome
• Three Tips to Reduce Personal Data Tracking
• Is IE7 the new IE6