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How to change default behaviour from google.com to google.co.uk for new tabs

  • 2 replies
  • 6 have this problem
  • 5 views
  • Last reply by RamRaider

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When opening a new tab and typing directly into the address bar ( not the search bar - don't use that ) the default behaviour seems to be to use google.com for results. No matter what I try to change this I am unable to set this to google.co.uk so must manually change the results page once it loads to show results from Google.co.uk. Why are we unable to set / change this behaviour? Not everybody comes from the US of A and I find this to be particularly annoying. I had thought perhaps that changing references to google.com to google.co.uk in the google.xml file found in /browser/searchplugins would have done the trick - sadly this was not the case. Is this behaviour hardcoded into the runtime?

When opening a new tab and typing directly into the address bar ( not the search bar - don't use that ) the default behaviour seems to be to use google.com for results. No matter what I try to change this I am unable to set this to google.co.uk so must manually change the results page once it loads to show results from Google.co.uk. Why are we unable to set / change this behaviour? Not everybody comes from the US of A and I find this to be particularly annoying. I had thought perhaps that changing references to google.com to google.co.uk in the google.xml file found in /browser/searchplugins would have done the trick - sadly this was not the case. Is this behaviour hardcoded into the runtime?

All Replies (2)

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Hi, I'm in the UK and I get .co.uk. as default. However if you go to the UK version and then follow the 'Add a search engine' instructions in this article - Use the Search bar in Firefox and manage search engines, you should be able to add it to your search engine list.

Another possibility is to try adding your location on the Google search page - Options > Search settings > Location.

If your question is resolved by this or another answer, please take a minute to let us know.

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Ok - finally it would now appear that google.co.uk is used as required. For anyone else in the same situation:-

Remove, from installed search engines, google.com and then go to

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-uk-ssl/?src=search

and click "Add to Firefox"

Thanks Scribe_uk