Firefox 36.0 search menu UI disaster - analysis and solution

Geez, who came up with that new design of the Firefox search menu and WHY? I can't come up with any reasonable reason why this design would be a good thing.


Luckily, there is a way to change back to the original functionality:

go to  about:config
set  browser.search.showOneOffButtons  to  false

( Tip taken from here: How to disable the new One-Click Search Bar in Firefox )

 

 

 Analysis

The old interface was a simple drop-down menu with a list of all the possible search engines (= all
pages that could be searched directly searched from the search box in Firefox without having to open them first). The engines were listed with their icon and name. Engine choice was sticky: once you selected an engine it would stay selected until you selected another.

This old interface made perfect sense considering how people issue search requests - typically in the form of bursts. Eg. if you have a language translator site in your search engine list there is a high probability that you will use the translator site several times in a row - eg. while writing a text in that language. Or that you will use Google or Wikipedia several times in a row when researching a topic.

The new interface gives you a drop-down menu as well, BUT:

1. search engines are only shown by their respective icons and not by their names
2. engine selection does not stick anymore, and 
3. autocomplete suggestions are embedded into(!) the drop-down menu

1. is very, very bad if you actually use the search menu. For basic users who only ever use the search box with Google it might not be a big issue. But for power users who really use the search menu it's very bad: many engines have identical or extremely similar icons, so you can not tell them apart at a glance any longer. Eg. different language versions of Wikipedia all have the same "W" icon and different language versions of translator engines like http://dict.leo.org/ are so similar that it's practically impossible to distinguish them. What used to be a nice search engine list with Google, 2 versions of Wikipedia and two entries of a translator enginge now mutated into Google plus 2 pairs of indistinguishable icons. Yes, you could hover over the icons to get mouse-over information but it takes about 1sec for that to appear, so you now have to fiddle and wait for something that you used to be able to choose immediately and see at a glance. Great - NOT.

2. now, when you want to look up several words at your favorite translation engine you have to click that engine for every. new. search. request. Doh! Add the fact that the icons look so similar and that you're typically going to use search engines in a "bursty" fashion with a number of requests to the same engine in a row and it becomes a major annoyance! Yes, you could change the default search engine but for this you have to change settings in the settings dialog. And while the settings dialog is at least directly accessible from the search drop down menu it's still more hassle than simply using an engine and having it stick automatically - especially as you are about to use the same engine for probably 5 requests before you are going to use another engine for another 5 requests in a row. In addition, changing something in a "real" settings dialog is usually intimidating especially to novice users so they would never do this for a couple of requests.

3. as autocomplete suggestions now appear inline in the drop-down menu the menu gets longer when you have a long suggestion list (I guess this might be the rationale for showing only the icons of the search engines as they can be grouped to take up less vertical space?). This means that when you have a long list, your mouse travel time to the non-default engines becomes quite long.