Subject: Default DuckDuckGo search doesn't work

From: Márton Tamás <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 10:11:05 +0200

Dear fellow hackers,

I've been using GNU IceCat for a few years now (with great
satisfaction). I've been using the DuckDuckGo Lite engine by adding
their announced OpenSearch description. A few weeks ago it stopped
working (the page loaded but with an empty query) but I was able to
resolve this with removing and re-adding from the OpenSearch. I believe
DuckDuckGo updated their site and uploaded a new OpenSearch description
as well (the current description file
<https://duckduckgo.com/opensearch_lite_v2.xml> has a 1 July 2020
"last-modified" header and "_v2" suffix in filename). So far it's a
DuckDuckGo issue, IceCat has nothing to do with it (I try to contact DDG
meanwhile to suggest implementing automatic updates
<https://developer.mozilla.org/hu/docs/Web/OpenSearch#Supporting_automatic_updates_for_OpenSearch_plugins>,
maybe it solves similar future issues).

While I was investigating my problem however, I also tried restoring the
default search engines, and found that they all (eg. Amazon, Bing, eBay
search) worked except for "DuckDuckGo Search". The exact problem seems
to be that this specific search plugin/addon/extension (I'm unsure)
makes a POST request, which is 302-redirected to an empty search page.
The site probably accepts the search term only in a GET request. Since I
haven't used this default search in a long time, I don't know if it's a
new issue, but I believe it has to be fixed in one of the following ways:

  * Remove this search engine from IceCat's defaults.
  * Fix the search plugin (or whatever) to make correct requests.

The latter may be a plugin issue (not IceCat), but I can't find out what
kind of component it is and who the maintainer might be. If anyone could
please help by giving me directions about it, I could march along to get
it fixed.

Technical details:

  * GNU IceCat version: 60.3.0esr (64-bit)
  * OS: Trisquel GNU/Linux 8.0, Flidas

Cheers,
Tamás