Probably explains why I’m not allowed to just make Kagi my default search engine on iOS and Mac.
They have a lot of other options though. Maybe because Kagi isn’t well known? What makes it different from the ones they offer?
For reference you can select your default to be:
- Yahoo
- Bing
- Baidu
- DuckDuckGo
- Sogou
- 360 Search
- Ecosia
Also of those what do y’all like the most? I’ve been using DuckDuckGo and it’s decent.
The real problem is that it is not possible to set a custom search engine like you can in Firefox (with a hack) or Chromium browsers.
Also, not sure where you are in the world but I (in the US) only have the following options:
- Yahoo
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo
- Ecosia
Why do you need a hack?
Firefox supports OpenSearch, you can just go to any search engine (like my searxng site) and right-click the address bar to add it to your search engines.
Or you can manually add it from settings by just adding the address of the search site. It will determine the proper format automatically, no need to add the
%sstuff you typically would.Firefox also handles suggestions properly, Chrome doesn’t seem to support them at all outside of their engine.
At least for me, to manually add the search engine, I had to follow this superuser answer to be able to add the custom search engine.
Maybe the search engine you were trying to add doesn’t support OpenSearch?
The problem is not whether or not the site supported open search, the problem is that Firefox should have allowed me to easily and intuitively set a custom search engine. When I go into Google Chrome and want to set a search engine, I can easily figure it out. Having to change an about:config flag is not at all intuitive.
For the record, I was trying to save my bookmarklet URL from DuckDuckGo and the open search functionality wasn’t working to save my bookmarklet query string.
Oh yeah I see what you mean now, that is dumb.
I didn’t realize they removed the ability to manually add a search engine (without flipping flags)
Somebody should compile a list of flags you might wanna toggle/change on a new install of FF. Actually I imagine someone already has
I pay for Kagi because it does not have any form of advertising or “sponsored results”, and it consistently gives me the best results of any other browser I’ve tried.
Apple supporting this would not be hard, as with all the other search engines the search is just a query parameter appended to the url, they could just provide a template string for “unsupported” search engines.
they could just provide a template string for “unsupported” search engines.
Like everyone else does.
Apple isn’t not supporting it because doing so would be hard, it’s just another way to maintain control over their walled garden and make a profit selling exclusivity.
Started trying Kagi this week. So far impressed.
Only Kagi
You can! Try xSearch from Appstore, it allows you to set any search URL as default for Safari.
They need access to your data usage for this.
People use Safari on Mac?
Safari is in second place behind Chrome and has 15% of the browser market share globally and 25% in the USA. Yeah, people use Safari.
But that’s because of iPhone. Macs are a tiny percent of devices globally.
Tbf I use it on my MacBook, it’s good enough and it has a nice integration with Apple account (no way Sherlock)
It’s one of the few browsers that’s not powered by Chrome, so yeah.
Modern Chrome and Safari used to share the same open source engine until it was forked. They’re not that different from each other
But Google has no influence over WebKit/Safari
They’ve been diverged for nearly 10 years, and their features and compatibility vary significantly at this point.
Yes, they share the same WebKit roots, but Safari isn’t likely to make it impossible to block ads any time soon. That’s difference enough.
Safari is great. Quick Look, syncing tab groups, good touchpad navigation, non janky UI and probably more are my reasons for using it. I just wish it was possible to have shared bookmarks with Firefox which I use on Linux (or have an actual Linux port of it even but that’s even less going to happen)
Safari power usage on mac is incredibly low compared to Firefox and other browsers. If you’re on battery while on Mac hardware I highly recommend using Safari
