Customizable search engines
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I would like to see this feature, hoping to see some progress
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The desktop browser can already do this, but is it possible to use POST searches instead of GET searches in Android? Doesn't have to be the default, but I'd appreciate it if the option was there. Currently, unless a user has a VPN, all search information will be available to any ISP or person monitoring a network. Of course there are alternate solutions like a VPN or only doing searches through a search engines website (Startpage does POST by default and duckduckgo can do it after a setting change), but it'd still be nice to see it as an official feature.
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Why isnt brave search on the list?
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@anthony155 said in Customizable search engines:
Why isnt brave search on the list?
https://search.brave.com/search?q=%s -
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@stardepp said in Customizable search engines:
@anthony155 said in Customizable search engines:
Why isnt brave search on the list?
https://search.brave.com/search?q=%sAhem, on android...
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@KumarArnim1 I have never seen this or a screen like it appear in the Android version of Vivaldi, and I spent about an hour last night trying. Are you sure this is actually a thing in Vivaldi for mobile?
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@Viqsi This feature is available natively on Chromium for Android, and as a result, on most Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Opera, Brave... except Vivaldi. This means they deliberately removed it for some reason (hopefully a good one)...
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Oh wow, how is adding a custom search engine not a feature yet.
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@WatsinAnem They didn't remove it. The engine part of the browser and the actual browser part of the browser are not the same. it is not built in to the Vivaldi browser yet. Patience.
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It's now sorta-kinda-maybe in, as part of Vivaldi 5.3 on desktop and on mobile. I can't edit search engines directly on my phone yet, but I can edit them in my desktop browser and then they show up in my phone.
So... yay?
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This is just bizarre. You can sync search engines across devices, but only edit them on your desktop? This seems completely backwards. Why implement the harder feature (sync) than the easier one (edit locally)?
Also, many people don't like to log in to anything that they don't have to. Mainly for privacy, but also to reduce the number of network connections to help battery life.
Have to say, this new feature is weird (and unusable for me).
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Just to underline my point, here is how you can actually add custom search engines in Vivaldi Android:
It's literally as simple as putting a row into an SQLite database. You can do it yourself if your phone is rooted. This should be in the UI, it's so basic and simple.
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@Ayespy said in Customizable search engines:
@WatsinAnem They didn't remove it. The engine part of the browser and the actual browser part of the browser are not the same. it is not built in to the Vivaldi browser yet. Patience.
@Ayespy The engine that you are talking about is called Blink and Chromium is basically ungoogled Chrome browser using Blink. Chromium, the browser, is open-source. Vivaldi uses more than just Blink, the rendering engine. For example, if you navigate to vivaldi://settings page, you will see that it's identical to that of Chromium. This shows that under the hood, it's mostly Chromium source code and not just the rendering engine. Only a fraction of Vivaldi is proprietary code, which is mainly the UI (tab stacking, customization page...). In fact, this is detailed in their own article on the Vivaldi blog.
If you compile and install the latest version of Chromium, the custom search feature that I mentioned before is available.
It works as follows:- Visit a search engine webpage that conforms to OpenSearch description format
- The url is automatically recognized and the option to set that search engine as the default appears in settings
The source code could be borrowed and implemented in Vivaldi. As @KumarArnim1 pointed out, it was indeed present at some point in Vivaldi but they deliberately removed it.
The real question though is why did they remove it in the first place?
@adzarooni said in Customizable search engines:
This is just bizarre. You can sync search engines across devices, but only edit them on your desktop? This seems completely backwards. Why implement the harder feature (sync) than the easier one (edit locally)?
Also, many people don't like to log in to anything that they don't have to. Mainly for privacy, but also to reduce the number of network connections to help battery life.
Have to say, this new feature is weird (and unusable for me).
I also agree with this user. Not everyone needs search engine sync. They could have left the Chromium feature as a simple stop-gap solution. For most people using esoteric search engines like Searx, it's more than enough.
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@adzarooni said in Customizable search engines:
Why implement the harder feature (sync) than the easier one (edit locally)?
Because it's the other way around, actually - it was much easier to implement Sync than creating a proper search engines editor for Android.
But the latter will come too, of course - don't worry. Actually, in order to implement search engine sync, more changes had to be made on the desktop, rather than on Android.@adzarooni said in Customizable search engines:
It's literally as simple as putting a row into an SQLite database. You can do it yourself if your phone is rooted. This should be in the UI, it's so basic and simple.
I'd argue that signing up for a free account and using your desktop and the browser you're already familiar with is much easier than rooting the phone (not to mention the risk of voiding the warranty or even bricking your phone) and having to use the desktop anyway, with software that an average user has probably never heard of, and executing commands they don't even understand. But that's my opinion.
Nevertheless, syncing the search engines is just one step forward - but we're not stopping there. We want to offer more possibilities, and we will expand this feature in our future releases.
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@pafflick said in Customizable search engines:
Because it's the other way around, actually - it was much easier to implement Sync than creating a proper search engines editor for Android. But the latter will come too, of course - don't worry. Actually, in order to implement search engine sync, more changes had to be made on the desktop, rather than on Android.
You're clearly going to know more about the codebase than I am, so I'll take your word for it. However, I find it weird that a sync feature (with all of its complexities) is easier to implement than a few text boxes and a one-line SQL add command (yes I understand you have to sanitise inputs, etc). You also seem to have contradicted yourself a little since you admitted that a whole bunch of extra work had to be done on the desktop (not to mention the backend) to bring this feature to Android.
@pafflick said in Customizable search engines:
I'd argue that signing up for a free account and using your desktop and the browser you're already familiar with is much easier than rooting the phone (not to mention the risk of voiding the warranty or even bricking your phone) and having to use the desktop anyway, with software that an average user has probably never heard of, and executing commands they don't even understand. But that's my opinion.
That's not what I was getting at. I'm not suggesting that regular users use this method. What I was suggesting is that, from a coding point of view, not much work has to be done (text boxes and SQL add) to make this locally editable.
@pafflick said in Customizable search engines:
Nevertheless, syncing the search engines is just one step forward - but we're not stopping there. We want to offer more possibilities, and we will expand this feature in our future releases.
Thanks for that. I was expecting this to be the case but it just seemed the wrong way around to do things. I also hope I didn't come off as rude, the situation just seem odd to me.
