One of the great things about having the source code to your phone’s operating system is that you can change your phone’s behaviour in ways you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
For example, on my Geeksphone Peak the default search provider in the browser is Bing. I’d like to switch this to Google because I like Google’s search results better. Currently this isn’t a user-configurable option in the phone’s settings (although this might change soon), but it’s possible to change nonetheless.
It turns out to be relatively simple to do this, at least once you’ve got a workflow set up to build Gaia, the Firefox OS user interface. In the source tree for you’ve grabbed from github, find and edit the file gaia/apps/browser/js/browser.js and change:
DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_URL: 'm.bing.com', DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_TITLE: 'Bing', DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_ICON: 'http://bing.com/favicon.ico',
to:
DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_URL: 'www.google.com', DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_TITLE: 'Google', DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_ICON: 'https://www.google.com/favicon.ico',
Then simply build (./build.sh gaia) and flash (./flash.sh gaia) Gaia to the phone. After the flash is complete, you should find the default search is now Google.com:
