Changing your default search engine takes almost no time — unless you count the time sunk into deciding which site to appoint to that role. Mozilla Firefox, however, provides a crafty feature that lets you use a different search site just for your current query without having to type that site’s address first: Click the search-engine icon in its address bar and choose from the options there.
This is great for experimentation with a different search site, keeping a particular search out of your history at your usual site, or giving yourself a break from answers that spotlight artificial intelligence results. Firefox’s default choices are Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Perplexity and Wikipedia, but you can remove those you don’t use and, via a fussier process, add others.
Competing, more widely used browsers don’t have an equivalent to this. Instead, they leave it to users to puzzle through which third-party extension to add from many apparently redundant choices from developers you may have never heard of before. That is less than great.
Google and Microsoft might not want to make it easier for their customers to try out competitors’ search sites rather than their own, but Apple has no such self-interest. It ought to take the hint and use this idea.
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