Mozilla Firefox is my preferred browser. It stable and secure. It has lots of add-ons that enable users to customize their browsing experience. One of the cool customization possibilities is adding search engine plugins.

List of Installed Search Engines

To see what search plugins are available to you, click on the down-arrow at the beginning of the search bar in Mozilla Firefox.

A list of search engines will appear in a drop-down menu.

To use one of them, simply click on them. Then type your search keyword or term in the search box and press enter to do a search using the search engine of your choice.

The results of the search will be displayed in a new tab.

Changes to the List

To change the order in which your search engines are shown, select Manage Search Engines… from the drop-down menu.

The Manage Search Engine List window will open.

To change the order of a search engine, click on its name then click the Move Up or Move Down button.

You can also remove a search engine by selecting it and clicking on the Remove button.

To browse the full selection of search engines, click on the Get more search engines… link or click here for a direct link.

Adding Search Engines to the List

Installing search engines is pretty straightforward. You click on the green + Add to Firefox button located next to search engine’s name in Mozilla’s online list of search engines. After a few seconds it is added to your list of search engines.

But sometimes, an error occurs during the install procedure stating that “Firefox could not install the search plugin from URL because an engine with the same name already exists.”

This specifically happened to me with the Bing search engine, although I have never installed it before and it was not in the list of search engines.

The solution to this matter is to download the search plugin’s XML file and manually add it to your Firefox profile folder.

To do this, right-click on the + Add to Firefox button and select Save Link As… from the drop-down menu.

In the Enter name of file to save to… window just click Save.

Open Windows Explorer (Win+E) and locate the downloaded XML file. Right-click on the file and select Copy from the drop-down menu.

Now go to your Firefox profile folder. It is located at:

Simply copy the above address and paste it into Windows Explorer’s address bar. Don’t forget to replace User_Name with your actual user name.

Double-click on your profile folder which is a sequence of characters automatically created by Mozilla Firefox when it is installed. Then double-click the searchplugins sub-folder.

Right-click within the folder and select Paste from the drop-down menu.

You have successfully added the search engine to your list. Double-check it by clicking on the down-arrow at the beginning of the search bar in Mozilla Firefox.

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