Depending on your country and region, Firefox may come with a different search engine set by default. For example, if you are living in Russia, you could have Yandex as your default search engine in the Firefox browser. You might want to change to some other search provider. Here is how.
At the moment of this writing, Firefox 57 is the most recent version of the browser. I will use this version to show the procedure.
Firefox 57 is a huge step forward for Mozilla. The browser comes with a new user interface, codenamed "Photon", and features a new engine "Quantum". It was a difficult move for developers, because with this release, the browser drops support for XUL-based add-ons completely! All of the classic add-ons are deprecated and incompatible, and only a few have moved to the new WebExtensions API. Some of the legacy add-ons have modern replacements or alternatives. Unfortunately, there are plenty of useful add-ons which have no modern analogs.
The Quantum engine is all about parallel page rendering and processing. It is built with a multi-process architecture for both CSS and HTML processing, which makes it more reliable and faster.
In Firefox 57, there is no more a dedicated search box in the address bar pane. It is assumed that you will type your searches right in the address text field. Tip: You can restore the search box if you want. See the following article:
Add Search Box to Firefox 57 Quantum
To change the search engine in Firefox, do the following.
- Click on the hamburger menu button (the last button on the right in the toolbar).
- The main menu will appear. Click on Options.
- In Options, click on the Search category on the left.
- On the right, choose a new search engine from the drop-down menu under Default Search Engine.
Tip: You can open this option directly by entering the following in the address bar.
about:preferences#search
In the general case, you can choose between the following pre-installed search engines.
- Yahoo
- Bing
- Amazon.com
- DuckDuckGo
- eBay
- Wikipedia
Tip: Firefox has a nice feature, which allows you to change the search engine on the fly by pressing hotkeys. See Switch Firefox search engine with hotkeys and set it as default.
That's it.
Support us
Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:
Can you elaborate to include how we can ADD an alternative search engine as the default firefox search engine?
I’m trying to make yandex my default