I upgraded to Firefox 4 and found the default google search was sending me to google.com. This meant US shopping results in dollars, amongst other things.
In your Firefox directory,
Windows:
C:\Program Files\Firefox or C:\Program Files (x86)\Firefox
Linux:
/usr/lib/firefox-xxxx/
You will find a folder called “searchplugins“. In there is google.xml
Make a copy of this and edit the contents so that each mention of “google.com” changes to “google.co.uk”. Also change the title (ShortName) from “Google” to “Google UK”.
In linux this is easy,
sed -e 's/google.com/google.co.uk/g; s/ShortName>Google/ShortName>Google UK/' google.xml | tee google-uk.xml
In windows it maybe a little more tricky as UAC gets in the way. The easiest way to do it, is to copy google.xml to your desktop, rename it to google-uk.xml, open it in notepad, make the changes and move it back.
Alternatively you can download google-uk.xml from here and place it in the searchplugins folder and restart Firefox.
Download
google-uk.xml (2.3 KiB, 1,848 hits)
I just downloaded the xml file and job done. Previous efforts to modify the xml file in th esearch plugins folder failed but the new file copied to the folder OK and Google UK appears in the list of selections.
Taken me ages to find this.
Glad to be of help. Whilst this site is primarily to remind myself, like my own searchable wiki, its nice to know search engines help others to find answers here as well 🙂