To start a search from an add-on there is a nice API. However, it requires another “search” permission…
I don’t like that…
I mean, okay, for getting all search engines I think it is acceptable, as this can obviously contain private information.
But, IMHO; if you just want to trigger a search with the default provider (i.e. you leave out the engine
parameter), it should not prevent me from doing that.
I mean, after all, I I knew the search engine the user used, I could just open a new tab without any extra permissions with the correct URL string… So this discourages me from using the API and implementing such an ugly workaround.
BTW use case: I basically want to use/start a search as a fallback, if the user does not want to use the keyword search (omnibar
API), i.e. disables it.