GNOME search only partially working with Firefox

[alira]

Hi, I hope this is the right place to post this - it’s hard to tell if it’s a GNOME bug or if it’s something with Firefox.

I’m using GNOME 41.2 on Fedora 35 workstation. When I hit Super and type to search, one option which comes up is to search for what I’ve typed on Firefox. However, if I type a multi-word search, only the first word is picked up by Firefox:

Other applications are able to recognise multiple words. For example, typing “New Zealand” brings up results from the “Clocks” app with the current time in NZ. However the Firefox results only use the word “New” and don’t search for “Zealand”.

Is there a way to make Firefox recognise the other words?

[sthursfield (Sam Thursfield)]

Interesting question. Let’s look at how the search provider works.

In /usr/share/gnome-shell/search-providers/ you will find firefox-search-provider.ini:

[Shell Search Provider]
DesktopId=firefox.desktop
BusName=org.mozilla.Firefox.SearchProvider
ObjectPath=/org/mozilla/Firefox/SearchProvider
Version=2

So search results come over D-Bus using name org.mozilla.Firefox.SearchProvider. Using D-Feet we can see that name is provided by /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox.

If I try to call the search provider interface manually…

gdbus call --session --dest org.mozilla.Firefox.SearchProvider --object-path /org/mozilla/Firefox/SearchProvider --method org.gnome.Shell.SearchProvider2.GetInitialResultSet "['new','zealand']"

…I see results only for “New.” So it looks like this is a bug in Firefox itself. I suggest reporting it to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

[alira]

Thanks for figuring that out! I’ll post about it there