when i modify one of my firefox ( debian iceweasel 31.2.0 ) search engine descriptions , i usually edit an ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/searchengines/*.xml and restart .
with built-in searchengine dialogue , i can only remove or assign shortcuts to existing search engine entries .
what i want is an interface that the whole xml structure is exposed , i can create modify and delete entries and save changes without restart .
chrome ( debian chromium 35.0.1916.153 ) has roughly the feature i expect with chrome://settings/searchEngines . three most significant search engine description fields can be edited . change can be saved without restart . bug report 782563 on bugzilla is about firefox catching up with chrome for search engine integration . but the feature i ask for here is not mentioned in that report .
a simple approach i think of is edit a search engine description xml file and let firefox load it . but when i open such file i see tag soup displayed instead of installing it . i guess i need to configure a http service that identify the search engine description with appropriate mime type .
i am aware of the mycroft project . but i still keep a local copy of my xml files , because one major drawback of the mycroft project web application is we cannot inspect the search engine details on the web page . we have to click button to install a search engine description before we check it out . a workaround is we pretend to submit a new search engine description loading an existing one as template .
i think i can fork mycroft project , or write some greasemonkey userscript to make mycroft project web application to surrender its internals . are there any work by others addressing such issues ?
i once came across the add-on search-engine-manager-0.1.3 from Erik Vold , but this never seemed to work . and it doesn't look actively maintained since 2012 although i find the author once commented on bug report 335781 on bugzilla in 2014 , i wonder if the author thinks this add-on is still alive .
that forementioned bug report is about search management but marked wontfix in favour of 1106205 . however the latter report don't come with much detail .
i want to know if i can use the javascipt repl from the built-in develeper utils to access search engine descriptions . are there javascript funcitons exposed relating to search engine descriptions ? i aprieciate if there are related documentation .
so what i want to hear from answers is how can i get this feature , either a javascript ( or other programmable ) interface , or an add-on , or a web application .
