Comment 5 for bug 1082252

<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652809> unfortunately shows no solution for the live/submitted distinction, despite an application developer asking specifically how to handle it. I'm not an engineer, and I see no user benefit from switching to GtkSearchEntry. I'm just explaining how the design would need fixing if anyone else wanted to do that. :-)

Whether "local searches with GNOME3 are usually live searches" is not really relevant, for three reasons. First, whether it's local or not isn't relevant: USC searches are currently local, but may become Internet-based in future, while still being live. Second, Gnome 3 has few useful (and hardly any best-in-class) applications, so Ubuntu will indefinitely ship applications from elsewhere, including applications with search functions that can't reasonably be live. And third, notwithstanding your sterling work on the Ubuntu Gnome Remix, I'm sure you understand that the vast majority of people who use Gnome 3 software will never encounter the "Gnome" name -- so we can't reasonably use that to establish a mental model for how search fields behave.

As I understand it, neither Firefox (XUL) nor LibreOffice (VCL) use GTK at the widget level. And even if they did, GtkSearchEntry doesn't seem featureful enough for Firefox to be able to use it anyway.