On Wednesday 01 February 2012 10:08:38 MJ Ray wrote:

Any guide on setting Firefox/Iceweasel to completely replace Google? I think I've got all of the defaults and I've installed noscript.net, but I'm not entirely confident.

This changes the search field to use SSL DuckDuckGo:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duck-duck-go-ssl/

This changes the engine used by the awesome bar (must be done after installing the addon above):

Go to about:config Find 'browser.search.defaultenginename' Change the value of this key to 'DuckDuckGo (SSL)' (without quotes), or however DuckDuckGo is labelled in the dropdown list of engines in your search bar.

Be aware that DuckDuckGo is imperfect - they have better privacy but currently poorer results, and they rely on Bing, which still demotes important FS pages according to Roy Schestowitz.

Thanks to my FSFE co-worker Hugo Roy who got this question answered here:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/853286#answer-286320

I've also tried Chromium recently (the FOSS browser inside Chrome) and I've been really disappointed with how clunky the privacy controls are. Am I being dense and using it wrong, or do they not want users to have any privacy? ;-)

Go figure :) I used to use Chrome on my netbook before Firefox 4 was released and was fast enough to be used on low resource devices. However now I steer well clear of Chrome / Chromium, because getting it widely used is a key part of Google's market domination strategy, and they are using it to impose their own new and modified standards web by leveraging their huge userbase. Also Mozilla is a not for profit and I trust my browsing them them a great deal more than Google, which, given your statements above, is a view you probably share :)

Thanks,

Sam.