Bug 41835, 42891, 43105: Cleanup on the search engines

Merge Info

Related Issues

• #41835 (closed) #42891 (closed) #43105 (closed)
• mullvad-browser#xxxxx
• tor-browser-build#xxxxx

Backporting

Timeline

• Immediate: patchset needed as soon as possible
• Next Minor Stable Release: patchset that needs to be verified in nightly before backport
• Eventually: patchset that needs to be verified in alpha before backport
• No Backport (preferred): patchset for the next major stable

(Optional) Justification

• Emergency security update: patchset fixes CVEs, 0-days, etc
• Censorship event: patchset enables censorship circumvention
• Critical bug-fix: patchset fixes a bug in core-functionality
• Consistency: patchset which would make development easier if it were in both the alpha and release branches; developer tools, build system changes, etc
  • This MR includes a commit that bumps the TBB UI migration integer. It would be nice to stay coherent
  • We're going to do a watershed, unless Moz retreats what they said about the Windows 7 prolonged life. Including all the migrations before the watershed would be very nice, as after the watershed we can clean the migration function and keep only the part in which we set our preference.
  • In case, I will do the backport through a separate MR, since the changes I want to backport are specifically pierov/tor-browser@a142abd7 and pierov/tor-browser@75282baf.
• Sponsor required: patchset required for sponsor
• Localization: typos and other localization changes that should be also in the release branch
• Other: please explain

Merging

• Merge to tor-browser - !fixups to tor-browser-specific commits, new features, security backports
• Merge to base-browser - !fixups to base-browser-specific commits, new features to be shared with mullvad-browser, and security backports
  • NOTE: if your changeset includes patches to both base-browser and tor-browser please clearly label in the change description which commits should be cherry-picked to base-browser after merging

Issue Tracking

• Link resolved issues with appropriate Release Prep issue for changelog generation

Review

Request Reviewer

• Request review from an applications developer depending on modified system:
  • NOTE: if the MR modifies multiple areas, please /cc all the relevant reviewers (since gitlab only allows 1 reviewer)
  • accessibility : henry
  • android : clairehurst, dan
  • build system : boklm
  • extensions : ma1
  • firefox internals (XUL/JS/XPCOM) : jwilde, ma1
  • fonts : pierov
  • frontend (implementation) : henry
  • frontend (review) : donuts, richard
  • localization : henry, pierov
  • macOS : clairehurst, dan
  • nightly builds : boklm
  • rebases/release-prep : dan, ma1, pierov, richard
  • security : jwilde, ma1
  • signing : boklm, richard
  • updater : pierov
  • windows : jwilde, richard
  • misc/other : pierov, richard

Change Description

This commit is a first step for search engines update, after upstream changed a lot between the two ESRs.

1. We finally update the search engines to the new preferred list
2. We create a way to provide our configuration instead of Mozilla's, which is based on RemoteSettings. Even though we now have only local dumps, I preferred using fetch from chrome:// URLs this time, to keep things simpler, instead of trying to fit in Moz's mechanisms, which could cause conflict at each rebase if not done properly
3. Delete a lot of crust: we don't need most of the changes of the old search engine commit, let's just remove them
4. A long time ago we had tests about search engines. Keeping it up to date is a task that we can't check. I decided to remove it instead, and remove also the entire commits about test (that would probably not work). I've wanted to do it for a very long time 😁, and I think @brizental will confirm we don't need it anymore.

The search engine commit was at this point even more wrong than before, and I decided to just drop it. However, in my bug_42891_v1 branch you can see the all the steps I used to arrive to this result.

Basically, I first created that branch, then I created a new one, where I cherry-picked the commits not related to that branch.

Then I ran:

git revert 6f3c0d2f7298
git checkout bug_42891_v1 -- .
git commit

And checked that the final commit made sense.

How Tested

Ran and checked that:

• we have the expected search engines with the appropriate description
• searching in them leads to the expected result page
• we don't have complains about the extensions we've removed in the console (nor about disconnect)