Firefox - built in search engine toolbar broken

Question

When I change the order of the search engines (Toolbar -> Manage Search Engines -> Move up / down -> Ok) it changes the order, until I close and reopen the browser. I can't imagine that's the way it's supposed to work. I want it to stay in the order I select.

I have no add-ons installed that have anything to do with search engines, nor that add any toolbars.

I am not using a customized theme.

Apparently this problem is rare, as Googling [ "manage search engine list" ("order reverts" OR "order changes") ] return 0 results.

Firefox 3.6.12; Windows XP Pro SP3.

Answer 1

What if you remove them all, restart, then re-add them in your preferred order?

Or, in Firefox 3.6, your search engine settings are stored in search.sqlite in your profile folder. On Windows XP it's something like

C:\Documents and Settings\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\randomstuff\search.sqlite

You could download sqlite, extract the file into somewhere (e.g. c:\sqlite), close Firefox completely, then open a Command Prompt and do something like this:

c:\> set PATH=%PATH%;c:\sqlite
c:\> cd %APPDATA%
c:\> cd Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
c:\> cd <TAB>
c:\> sqlite3 search.sqlite
sqlite> .schema
CREATE TABLE engine_data (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, engineid STRING, name STRING,
value STRING);
sqlite> PRAGMA table_info('engine_data');
0|id|INTEGER|0||1
1|engineid|STRING|0||0
2|name|STRING|0||0
3|value|STRING|0||0
sqlite> select * from engine_data;
2|[app]/google.xml|order|1
3|[app]/yahoo.xml|order|2
4|[app]/wikipedia.xml|order|3
5|[app]/amazondotcom.xml|order|4
6|[app]/answers.xml|order|5
7|[app]/creativecommons.xml|order|6
8|[app]/eBay.xml|order|7
9|[app]/google.xml|used|1
sqlite> update engine_data set value=2 where name='order' and engineid like '%wikipedia%;
sqlite> update engine_data set value=3 where name='order' and engineid like '%yahoo%;
sqlite> update engine_data set value=4 where name='order' and engineid like '%ebay%;
sqlite> .quit

Where you change the number after value= to whatever number you want and the bit between the % to one of the options printed by select * from engine_data;.

Answer 2

I recommend you forget about this problem and install web search pro, features:

• You can change the order of your engines =).
• There are more engines to add to the list than firefox has.
• You can drag and drop to engines with a special feature called zones(temporarly divives firefox into a grid of search engines).
• Perfect integration with firefox.
• No ads of any kind.
• Compatibility with all the firefox versions.
• You have a lot of options to control the behavior of the searching.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/web-search-pro/