Internet Security Blog - Hackology

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’.

Must Read:  Google Suggestions are what People Search !

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’ 😉

3 comments

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Get Wise

Subscribe to my newsletter to get latest InfoSec / Hacking News (1 Email/week)
Utopia p2p Ecosystem