Yeah, this is crazy. Chrome's implementation of this (which allows you to type the beginning of a website's domain and then plus tab to use that site's search functionality) is already one of the things I miss most when I use Firefox. They should be improving this, not removing it.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox literally this week, and I am missing this so badly. Can't understand why they wouldn't copy this behavior in all these years. I hope they put it on their agenda now.
I was preparing to create my top 25 OpenSearch plugins manually (less popular plugins at addons.mozilla.org often lack autocomplete and have other quality issues). Glad I read this before wasting 2 hours of my life.
Now I'm just switching back to Chrome. Does Mozilla actually expect site owners to create search extensions for ~5% Firefox users (of which in turn ~5% will actively install such an extension)? Firefox performance has come a long way, but Chrome is still way more polished. Apparently, Chrome is at the same time more poweruser-friendly, which really irritates me.
No need, firefox supports custom search engines, but it a) doesn't store them automatically, you have to manually add them and b) doesn't have as nice a UI for them as chrome does. But it works. Why it isn't implemented better is beyond me, too. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21292283 for instructions.
