My Custom Firefox Search Plugins
June 18, 2008 – 9:55 pm
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 Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins, 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)
