Sunday, November 23, 2014

How To Change Search Engines In FVD Speed Dial To Google

Speed Dial (FVD) is a FireFox addon. Though it provides a number of useless and redundant features, the most helpful (to me) is the aesthetic. It provides a wallpaper and a search bar, every time you open a New Tab in your browser, instead of an antiseptic white blank page.

But there is a bug in it. Instead of my favourite search bar Google, it strong-arms either Yahoo or some other lame search engine for you. The work-around, although simple, is tedious and hard to remember. So being a good Samaritan, I provide it here. Chiefly for myself and on the off-chance, for those of you who might be in need of it.

For FireFox:

Navigate on your Windows desktop to:

C:\users\<Your Computer Name>/AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\u5p9yvq0.default-1441216605477\extensions\pavel.sherbakov@gmail.com\chrome\content\include\

Here you will see a javascript file named "speed_dial.js". Open it with Wordpad. Find "parent.document.location" in it (it's line 5262 btw). Replace this line:

parent.document.location = "http://flashvideodownloader.org/addon_search/?q="+encodeURIComponent(searchText)+"&from="+key;

With. . . 

parent.document.location = "http://www.google.com/search?q="+encodeURIComponent(searchText);

Taking care not to disturb any "{" or other code therein. Duh. Save the file, exit. Now re-start Firefox and voilla! you now have Google as you default search engine on your FVD Speed Dial. Adios Muchachos!