KulNet search extension

09 Feb 2006 Many people have tried to convince me of the "superiority" of firefox vs opera.
The only difference I see is that firefox has extensions and opera doesn't.

Firefox has a lot of extensions, but as far as I know, the functionality provided by the useful extensions, is already implemented in opera anyway, so no need for extensions right ?
Still, it would be great to see extensions in opera even if it just to have the option to create your own bloatware for opera too.

Every 5 weeks it's my turn to take up what we lovingly call "shit of the week". This includes network problems reported by network admins, firewall rule changes, DNS changes, changing configuration in all kinds of networking gear. We have an internal site with a lot of CGI-scripts to help us do this more efficient (from a browser). The problem I experience is that there are so many different scripts, I don't know which ones are best for what purpose or even if one exists for what I want at all.

In an effort to improve efficiency, I had the idea to make a firefox extension to create a smart search. For example, if I'm tracking down problems involving a certain MAC address, the smart search gives me all information it can find about this MAC address. Things like DHCP logs, backbone netflow logs, IP's used with this MAC-address, manufacturer information, ... are all displayed together just by entering a MAC-address.

At first I wanted to create a true extension that would have a couple input boxes on some toolbar. After some research I found that extensions in firefox consist mainly of javascript and XUL (some XML stuff to describe GUI widgets). I got sick just by looking at it all.

So instead of an extension, I created an extra search engine and added it to the search-box in firefox. I created a .src file too and a page where people from my unit can click on a link to install the new search engine.
The search engine is rather simple. Type in anything and it gets sent to a CGI on an internal webserver. That CGI will determine what kind of info you are looking for and will show the appropriate information in frames (I'm lazy and I just want to link to other CGI's ok ;)
together with a frame that has links to all the CGI's, in case the search engine interpreted wrong.

It looks really great and handy, although I haven't tested it yet in practice.

Unfortunately, I hardly ever use firefox and I wasn't looking forward to having to use firefox all of the time.
So I googled around this morning, looking to see if there really aren't any extensions for opera.
I found a page that explains how to add search engines in opera and another one
I added my search-engine and it works !

Again unfortunately, the opera support site says:


Opera comes with a default list of search engines, stored in a file called "search.ini". It is possible to edit this file to change or add searches, but this is an unsupported feature, and Opera will usually overwrite custom search.ini files when you upgrade to a new version, to ensure that the list of search engines is correct.


No matter what features firefox has to offer, I still keep finding ways to keep using opera :)