The current search service reflects the reality of ten years ago, when defaults by a language were sufficient, users didn't have easy access to secondary search engines, and geo-location of users wasn't just scary, it didn't reliably exist. When we had one global default search partner, it mattered a lot less than it does now. Today, we have multiple search providers in default, based on region rather than language, which mostly works by leveraging a web service. That's not quite ideal, and remains limited in practice to defaults, so we aren't really providing the best experience and options to our users. Today, we manage search defaults across 80+ l10n repositories, making it very difficult to maintain or update those plugins (migrating to SSL, updating branding, adding new icon sizes, etc). Exacerbating the problem is that there's no way for non en-US locales to share plugins other than those shipped in en-US, so there are many duplicate copies of the same plugin that have to be independently updated. We also don't have a good way of dealing with search plugins that vary by region, rather than language. This is especially true for e-commerce providers and the like. To improve the situation, we're going to start making changes to how we manage, ship, and enable search plugins in Firefox. We're starting with desktop because that's the biggest product, but the end goal will be to create one central source of truth for how our products expose search providers. Key steps along the way: 1) We'll start by centralizing all search plugins with a clear naming convention into the exist location. The build code in place will look there first for any entry in list.txt, so this will immediately deprecate the copies in l10n repos. Some changes to list.txt may be needed in some locales. Work on this will be tracked in Bug 1276740 2) Next, we'll create a new JSON-based format for search config/build purposes that replaces list.txt, localized browser.search.order* preferences, etc. We'll maintain the list.txt fallback for other Gecko-based products and migrate locale-by-locale, adding tests as we go. We'll migrate en-US first, and go in order of usage/impact. this is in Bug 1276739 3) We'll then migrate all search plugins to a product-neutral location in the tree. Desktop, Android and iOS will all use this central location as a source of truth. This may require additional per-product work to enable sharing a single repo for provider plugins. This will chain from bug 1276743