I have read the other posts but nothing seems to bring back my missing search engines. As root I have a firefox browser with search engines in the toolbar but as my regular user I have no search engines in the toolbar. I have chmod 777 the searchplugins folder, started in the safemode and reset everything but alas still no search engines. I have uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox several times and also thrown out the localstore.rdf but no search engines.
What else can I do? thanks!

After many days of trouble shooting this and trying all the fixes I could find, I finally concluded that the "Default" user for FireFox was corrupted so I started Firefox in the terminal with this command:

firefox -ProfileManager

This gave me the opportunity to delete the "default" user and create a new user and when I opened FireFox I had my search engines back.

Just to check you have copied your searchplugins directory from root's .mozilla/**********/searchplugins to your users account .mozilla/**********/searchplugins. Now if that is done while still as root goto your users directory that contains the searchplugins directory. Now run the following commands to gain ownership and groupship of the directory and it files.
chown -R username serachplugins
chgrp -R username searchplugins

See if that works.

Now the uage of firefox searchplugins differ abit from firefox 2.0 to firefox 1.5 or earlier. Just to check make both user and root are using the same firefox version.

Also as a security note. It is not recommended to run a webbrowser as root. If something like spyware could effect linux then this is the way to hurt a system.

Brian

Search engines disappear from Search Bar - MozillaZine Knowledge Base
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Search_eng...rom_Search_Bar