I have recently changed how web searches are initiated in the core of
NetSurf (CI builds 6789 and later)
This was initiated by Google changing to mandating extensive "anti bot"
javascript which NetSurf currently cannot process.
There does not appear to be any exception to this and Google have simply
ignored my attempt to contact them.
I have therefore selected (with consultation of the other developers)
DuckDuckGo as an alternative *default* provider as they still permit
search without Javascript
Somewhat annoyingly the Duck Duck Go favicon is served as a window
bitmap file with PNG encoding (which is not currently supported in
libbmp) so for the present time users will only see the default icon here.
The core browser web search has been present for some time but only a
handful of frontends allowed it to be configured. Indeed most frontends
do not even initialize the search providers (I added it to RISC OS in CI
build 6790)
The "search_web_provider entry" in the Choices file controls which
provider is used (e.g. "search_web_provider:Yahoo" means yahoo will be
used or "search_web_provider:DuckDuckGo" which is the new default)
There is also the option "search_url_bar" which when set to 1 allows
searches to be performed through the url bar.
The default welcome page has been amended to use the configured provider
rather than forcing users to edit the html source.
I am investigating adding the ability to configure the web search
provider in more frontends (at least RISC OS) as manually configuring
the Choices is not user friendly.
The current list of search providers is held in the file
https://git.netsurf-browser.org/netsurf.git/tree/resources/SearchEngines
and if more providers should be added I am open to suggestions.
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