firefox can only add search plugins when started as root because of wrong dir permissions on /usr/lib/MozillaFirefox/searchplugins. i think the dir permissions should be set to something more sensible, eg. group-owner users and mod 775. re-installing or updating firefox breaks custom changes to this directory. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. install mozilla-firefox 2. try to add a search-plugin through http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html 3. see no changes when adding search-plugins, but there should be some... Actual Results: nothing. but that's not desired. Expected Results: the searchplugins should be installed into /usr/lib/MozillaFirefox/searchplugins, but firefox raises no error and no plugins get installed. see http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1453602 (in german) for the irritation which is inducted. see even http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59671 firefox should display an error-message when it can't create files.
this is an upstream bug; giving write permissions to the dir in /usr/ is completely the _wrong_ way to go
*** Bug 51296 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***