A lightweight, XUL-based (a.k.a. "legacy") add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser to import and export your installed search engines (sometimes called "search plugins") from and to XML files in the OpenSearch format.
The latest public release can be installed from the page of the add-on in addons.mozilla.org (AMO).
It applies to Firefox ESR too, whose release 52 is supported officially by Mozilla until June 2018.
Being a legacy add-on, it can't be installed in Firefox 57 (a.k.a Firefox Quantum) and later versions, where only add-ons built using the WebExtensions model are accepted. Sadly, it's not possible yet to port this add-on to WebExtensions, and probably it will never be.
As an alternative, I rewrote the main functions of the add-on as single-file scripts that can be run manually via the Scratchpad Firefox tool:
- xseei.import.js: to import search engines.
- xseei.export-all.js: to export all your search engines to a single ZIP file.
Check the initial comments in the scripts themselves for further information.
- Creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox | Mozilla Developer Network
- The specification of the OpenSearch description format
- What about search hijacking? it presents the main upstream motivations to get rid of the XML-based storage system for search engines from Firefox.
- Questions, bug reports and feature requests are tracked in the issues page. You will need to have a GitHub account to post here. Alternatively, there is a thread in the MozillaZine forums open to general discussion.
- Translations are managed via the Crowdin platform. These have been kindly provided by volunteers. Please go there if you want to collaborate updating or starting a new localization; no technical knowledge is required.
- About code contributions via pull requests: before to start one, please create a new branch in your repository to accommodate your commits; it makes things easier if you need to do further amendments to your code.
All the source code is shared under the terms of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 2.0.