OpenSearch search providers and browsers

Subhash Chandran — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:06:10 +0000

All the major browser vendors support the OpenSearch format (yes, this means including Microsoft IE8) for registering a search provider in your browser.

Writing a OpenSearch provider

Recently I wrote a search provider for my favorite book-buying site, Pustak.co.in:



	Pustak.co.in
	Pustak.co.in provider
	UTF-8

Hosting your search provider

To let people use your search provider, you need to host it in the web. For our example, let us assume that you host it here: http://yourhost/your_opensearch.xml.

The MIME type of this document can be left to its default application/xml, or can be made OpenSearch specific: application/opensearchdescription+xml.

Using JavaScript to register a provider

After deploying the OpenSearch XML in your host, we need to write a JavaScript function to register the provider with your browser:

This JavaScript worked with Firefox, IE8 and Google Chrome. Opera 10 was not able to understand it.

Auto-discovering OpenSearch providers

Recently when I saw my Google Chrome search providers, I saw this list:

I was surprised to see this list because there are providers that I have not added specifically. How was Google Chrome “discovering” these providers?

A look into the HTML source of one of the auto-registering search provider, I found the following info (in the section):

To let browsers auto-discover you as a search-provider, add the above in your sites!

Best WebDeveloper plugins for Firefox

Subhash Chandran — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:56:29 +0000

I found this interesting link listing the most interesting Firefox plugins.