Comment 9 for bug 526453

While it may be nice to provide a way for users to change their default engine even when they've removed their search box, I still don't see why we can't have the default engine be initially set to whatever the user last set in their search box. That's at least more likely to be what they want than some arbitrary default we provide that they haven't set at all.

In other words, I think there should be one variable holding the current/default search engine, and both the search box and the alternate UI we implement (for when the search box is absent) should change it. That means I disagree with what Gavin says in comment #3 "was decided when this was changed". Is there a particular bug, set of use cases, etc. that made us decide this? I can't see what use case would benefit from this behavior, whereas I can think of several that benefit from my proposed behavior. (The key, of course, is that when the user has NOT hidden their search box, the "default search engine" pref is basically irrelevant, as selecting Tools->Web Search just takes you to your search box. If Tools->Web Search always used your "default engine" then I think the split prefs would make more sense.)

BTW, where is the "search manager" where this new UI can be exposed?