Category: FirefoxOS

After my OpenMoko device died (well, it made µ-sd cards really die every couple of days) I bought a GeeksPhone Peak. It was a wonderful device, specially for the money one could buy it (around 200 €). Unfortunately, FirefoxOS was utter crap. Meanwhile, not only the second battery died, the bugs, instability and the ultimate death of the Firefox OS platform mean this category is just about as dead.

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Fixing the FirefoxOS default search provider

WTF? FirefoxOS uses Bing as default search provider?

Yuck, I must fix that. Finally after almost a week I have had some time for me and that’s the first thing I must fix. Thanks to the very helpful comment from Mathieu in this blog post, I wrote a very small shell script that replaces the search provider to your favorite one, defaulting to Google.

It uses sudo for the privileged commands but doesn’t need to completely run as root. Its your choice, run ./fix-ffos-search-provider.sh or sudo ./fix-ffos-search-provider.sh taking as optional arguments (in this order), the Title, the URL and it’s Favicon url. Miss one and the Google default will be used 🙂 eg:

./fix-ffos-search-provider.sh \
  "Duck Duck Go" https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/favicon.ico

First, it sets the options, then starts adb-server and fetches the browser application (note that you need the android-tools package in Fedora or the Android SDK):

#!/bin/sh

TITLE=${1:-Google}
URL=${2:-www.google.com/m}
ICO=${3:-https://www.google.com/favicon.ico}

sudo adb start-server

sudo adb pull \
  /system/b2g/webapps/browser.gaiamobile.org/application.zip
sudo chown $USER:$GROUP application.zip

mkdir application
cd application/
unzip ../application.zip

Then, it does the magic with the help of Perl:

perl -pi -e " \
    s|(DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_URL: ?)'.*?'|\$1'$URL'|; \
    s|(DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_TITLE: ?)'.*?'|\$1'$TITLE'|; \
    s|(DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_ICON: ?)'.*?'|\$1'$URL'|; \
    " js/browser.js gaia_build_defer_index.js

Finally, it rebuilds the browser application and pushes it back to the phone and reboots it (it shouldn’t need a reboot, maybe there’s a way to avoid this?):

zip -fr ../application.zip .
cd ..

sudo adb remount
sudo adb push application.zip \
   /system/b2g/webapps/browser.gaiamobile.org/application.zip
sudo adb reboot

So, here it is, finally fixed 🙂 Well, temporarily (it will be better fixed following the results of https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/9454 and https://github.com/gasolin/gaia/commit/47072a825d9e7c2859f4f8de4fb200cc7450e10b or something similar) at least.

Screenshot of FirefoxOS browser googling for 'test'
Googling for ‘test’


CC0To the extent possible under law, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Fix FirefoxOS Default Search Provider. This work is published from Portugal.