Search is a central concept in the GNOME user experience. It provides quick navigation and shortcuts to recently used documents, places and software.

A search provider is used by an application to expose such data to the users via the GNOME Shell search screen. As for Web browsers currently only Gnome Web (Epiphany) have integrated this feature.

This long awaited feature finally arrives with the latest Firefox update in Fedora. Although there’s an upstream effort to ship it in Mozilla official builds, Mozilla builds are missing a generic way to install the GNOME Shell integration system. This explain why this specific feature has to be shipped by particular distributions.

Firefox search provider is launched when an active Firefox instance is running. It gets live data from user profile. An offline search provider was also considered but it’s not yet implemented right due to SQL database locks at Firefox profiles.

To get web search results on top of your search you may also need to activate Firefox in the search configuration. To do so go to Settings -> Search, find Firefox and move it on top of the list.

Now you can use the Gnome search facility to search the web.