OpenDNS and Firefox

Hi all !! Just a quick post before I go for my Physics-2 final exam (in which I have failed twice already, its my third attempt :P)…

I was having problems with YouTube and som other stuff… (a totally different issue, will discuss it in another post in detail); I ended up going *back* to OpenDNS.

Now you might ask why I had reverted back in the first place? WELL, I use the search (search-cum-I’m Feeling Lucky) feature of the Firefox “Awesome” bar (as its address bar is known) and using OpenDNS as my DNS server made it dysfunctional; it redirected all the queries to OpenDNS’ search-engine: “http://guide.opendns.com/?url=”

The solution: UNLIKE what other sites are telling you… this method does NOT ‘make’ you to choose between “query” mode or “I’m Feeling Lucky” mode !! The method I discovered helped me retain the default Firefox behavior of “Search-cum-I’m Feeling Lucky”.

Steps:

1. In the address bar type “about:config” (without the quotes) and hit enter.

2. Click on “I’ll be careful, I promise!” (if you actually do promise that :P)

3. In the “Filter” input box type “keyword” (without the quotes).

4. Double-click “keyword.URL” and overwrite the default value with “http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=” (without the quotes ofcourse). As you might have noticed the “ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&” part is removed from it !!

5. Click “Ok” and make sure that “keyword.enabled” is set to ‘true’. If its not, double-click it to set it to ‘true’.

6. In the “Filter” input box type “keyword” (without the quotes) and set “browser.fixup.alternate.enabled” to ‘false’.

7. Close this tab and use the address bar to search/feel-lucky in Google instead of using the search of OpenDNS.

Explaination:

This method is different than what the tell you on other sites (including MyDigitalLife) because they tell you to set it either to “http://www.google.com/search?q=” (direct search) OR “http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=” (I’m Feeling Lucky). Self explainatory 🙂

Hope it helped you enjoy the nice DNS services of OpenDNS without having to bear with their search ‘service’ 😉