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How do I get the search bar on the Firefox homepage to stop mirroring what's in the search toolbar?

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  • 7 have this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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This seems to be something new but I normally use the built in search toolbar at the top right of my Firefox window to search eBay, and I usually go to the Firefox Default Home/Start page for regular Google searches. Now it seems that whenever I try to search from the home/start page, I get results from whatever search engine is specified in the search toolbar up top. So if the toolbar is set to "eBay" and I search for something on the homepage, only results from eBay show up. I don't want this to happen. I want the homepage to search Google every single time, no matter what my search toolbar is set to. It's really annoying to have to go to the search toolbar, change the engine back to Google and then perform my search. I often open new tabs to quickly search for something relevant to what I'm working on because it takes less effort to hit Ctrl+T to open a new tab that's on the front page with my cursor already in the search field, than to use the toolbar where I have to take my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. How do I fix this. This "improvement" sucks.

This seems to be something new but I normally use the built in search toolbar at the top right of my Firefox window to search eBay, and I usually go to the Firefox Default Home/Start page for regular Google searches. Now it seems that whenever I try to search from the home/start page, I get results from whatever search engine is specified in the search toolbar up top. So if the toolbar is set to "eBay" and I search for something on the homepage, only results from eBay show up. I don't want this to happen. I want the homepage to search Google every single time, no matter what my search toolbar is set to. It's really annoying to have to go to the search toolbar, change the engine back to Google and then perform my search. I often open new tabs to quickly search for something relevant to what I'm working on because it takes less effort to hit Ctrl+T to open a new tab that's on the front page with my cursor already in the search field, than to use the toolbar where I have to take my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. How do I fix this. This "improvement" sucks.

Chosen solution

I overlooked an obvious solution to this problem. I just changed my Home Page to "www.google.com" instead of using the default Firefox Home Page. In retrospect, it makes little sense to use the Firefox default Home Page as a middleman to Google anyway.

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Try this extension to restore the keyword.URL preference which was removed from Firefox 23.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keywordurl-hack/

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Chosen Solution

I overlooked an obvious solution to this problem. I just changed my Home Page to "www.google.com" instead of using the default Firefox Home Page. In retrospect, it makes little sense to use the Firefox default Home Page as a middleman to Google anyway.

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Note that the Keyword Search extension has a setting for the built-in about:home page in its Options/Preferences windows, accessible via the about:addons page.