Make a "DuckDuckGo as default search engine" add-on

[davidhedlund]

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials adds DuckDuckGo as default search engine but a lot of users don't want the rest of the features.

Usefulness:

• Firefox Sync -- The default search engine preferences is not saved so you have to manually configure this.
• DuckDuckGo is the default search engine in the web browser GNU IceCat (which will be based on Firefox 57 in a few months) -- it could use the requested add-on instead of maintaining the source code.

Examples of existing add-ons that change the default search engine:

• Bing Search Engine
• StartPage.com — Private Search Engine
• Yahoo Search Addon

[rootvalues]

Hi. I've created a repo in response to this: https://github.com/rootvalues/duckduckgo-default

[davidhedlund]

@rootvalues Thank you for taking your time. Can you please ask the DDG developers if you can merge it to https://github.com/duckduckgo/ ? It will get most users if it's released by the DuckDuckGo company.

[rootvalues]

@alohaas @russellholt Requesting to merge https://github.com/rootvalues/duckduckgo-default to https://github.com/duckduckgo/

[davidhedlund]

@rootvalues Excellent. I'll ask the GNU IceCat developer to add and enable your add-on to the default browser profile if the DDG people upload it to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/duckduckgo/#my-submissions

[davidhedlund]

@rootvalues Is it possible for you to make a Git request?

[rootvalues]

@davidhedlund I don't think its possible to request to add a repository to DuckDuckGo's profile without developer permission.

[willemavjc]

@rootvalues Question for you if I may:

Like many others from what I'm reading over the web, I am personally not enjoying this hijacking and would like to be free to choose my search engine, whatever the reason behind that is (accuracy, mood, ...).

Am I correct if I say that this part is responsible for the search engine hijacking?

"chrome_settings_overrides": {
		"search_provider": {
			"encoding": "UTF-8",
			"name": "DuckDuckGo",
			"search_url": "https://duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}",
			"keyword": "duckduckgo.com",
			"favicon_url": "https://duckduckgo.com/favicon.ico",
			"suggest_url": "https://duckduckgo.com/ac/?q={searchTerms}&type=list",
			"is_default": true
		  }
}

If so, can I change it somewhere? (From Chrome/Edge or within some file on disk.)

Thanks!

--

Got my response by giving it a try. Published the procedure here: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo-privacy-extension/issues/90#issuecomment-646094340