How can I disable SSL (https) google search in FireFox?

Question

I know that Firefox 14 has enabled Secure Sockets Layer (SSL or https) search for its Google search plug-in. How can I disable it?

Thanks,

Answer 1

1. Go to %programfiles%\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins

2. Open google.xml

3. Replace any https://... By http://...

4. Do not forget to log out your Google account. If you are logged in, you will be redirected to the SSL protocol.

Answer 2

It's been a year since breceivemail answered this question and there are little changes:

If you can not find google.xml file or by chnaging it, nothing happens, follow these instructions:

• If you have not created a Firefox profile:

  1. Go to %programfiles%\Mozilla Firefox\browser\searchplugins
  2. Open google.xml file and replace https with http.

  3. Save it and you're done.
     

     • If you have a firefox profile created, After changing google.xml:

  4. Go to your Firefox profile. HOW?

  5. Delete search.json file and reopen your Firefox

Answer 3

The above accepted answer used to work for me, but it appears it is no longer sufficient. I noticed using Fiddler that sending HTTP requests to Google would always return 302s, redirecting me to the HTTPS url as long as a Firefox user agent string was included in the request header. This is my current user agent string using Firefox 24 on Windows 7 x64:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0

So for me, a simple fix was to start using the User Agent Quick Switch add-on for Firefox. I changed my user agent string like this - just removed the Firefox/24.0 at the end:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101

And now I am getting Google without HTTPS again. Go figure.