Change default search engine in Firefox on iPhone

Google is the biggest and most well known search engine. It is also the default search engine in many web browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, etc. It is not our only choice though. Due to privacy concern and other reasons, you may prefer alternative search engines. This quick guide shows you how you can change your default search settings, add new search engines to Mozilla Firefox browser on an iPhone or iPad.

Run Firefox browser on your iOS device. Tap the menu button at the bottom right corner. The menu opens at the lower section on your screen if you use Firefox on iPhone. Select Settings from the menu.

Firefox browser for iPhone menu

From the Search entry, you should see Google is selected as the current search engine. Tap the Search entry to open the Search settings.

Firefox browser for iPhone search settings

In the Default Search Engine section, tap on the current search engine to open the list of all search engines and set a new search engine as the default one.

If the search engine you like to use is not included in the list, go back to the Search settings screen, scroll down to the bottom, tap Add Search Engine. Enter a name for the new search engine in the Title text field. Enter URL with the query at the end in the URL text field.

Firefox browser for iPhone to add new search engine

If you don’t know which search string to use for a particular search engine, open this search engine in a new browser tap, search for any thing like ‘hello’, ‘world’, then copy the resulting URL in the address bar and paste it to the above URL field, then replace the query with %s. For example, if you search for ‘hello’ in Yandex.com, the resulting URL will be https://yandex.com/search/smart/?text=hello&lr=xxxxx. Then the search string should be https://yandex.com/search/smart/?text=%s. Ignore the segment after the query.

Tap the Save button at the top right corner of the screen to finish adding a search engine. Finally follow steps as specified above to set it as the new default search engine.

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