“Unlocalizing” Your FireFox Search Engines

To better learn Japanese, I recently changed all my software packages, including FireFox, to Japanese ones. (It’s quite easy on Mac OS X thanks to the excellent international support)

One thing annoying me is that the bundled Google and Wikipedia search became Japanese versions. And FireFox won’t allow you to add english Google back via the Mozzilla add-on center as it is “built-in”.

So here’s the fix

1. Download a English (US) version of FireFox, open the English FireFox.app package (Control-Click -> “Show Package Contents”), navigate to “Contents/MacOS/searchplugins“.

2. Open your localized version of FireFox.app, navigate to the same directory.

3. Copy any search engines you want from the English version to the localized version.

4. Now because you have two search engines named “Google” now, open the localized version of your search engine file (google-jp.xml, for example), and rename it.

5. Now for the final touch, change the location bar search back to Google.com. type “about:config” in the location bar, in the following screen change the value in “keyword.URL” from google.co.jp to google.com.

Now everything’s back to normal, and as a bonus, you now have some local search engines you’ve never heard of before, lol.