Fixing Firefox search add-ons in Ubuntu
I booted up my work machine today (a fully-patched Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64 installation) to find that most of my search engine add-ons in Firefox had disappeared.
Anyone that’s had this happen to them will notice that you literally cannot find/retrieve these basic add-ons with via the Add-ons store, and most searches online bring back results related to the Google toolbar (not helpful).
Eventually I tracked-down this post and I am eternally grateful to the poster because, not only did it it allow me to fix the issue myself (copy the missing .xml files from /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/ to the corresponding ‘en-GB’ folder) but I have also finally found a method to send my queries to google.co.uk instead of google.com… Just edit the appropriate .xml file, changing .com to .co.uk.
So no more having to deal with American shopping results!