For various work and e-banking website compatibility reasons, I moved off Firefox about a year ago and have been using IE extensively ever since. Lately though, because of weird Facebook behaviour in IE (e.g. constantly flickering comment box anyone?), I decided to revisit an old friend and downloaded Firefox 11. The most immediately annoying thing that struck me was how Firefox decided to incorporate Ask.com as it’s default keyword search engine!

Defaut keyword search – typing search terms directly into the browser address bar rather than in the search bar. In fact, IE9 has done away with a separate search bar entirely.

In order to change the keyword search from Ask.com back to Google, this is what you need to do:
1) In the address bar, type about:config. You might get a weird warning but it is ok to proceed.
2) Search for the keyword.URL config string and change the value to http://www.google.com/search?q=
3) Done!