Killing Google Instant (November 3rd, 2011 edition)

This morning, I woke up to find that Google had made another change which broke my solution for disabling Google Instant badly enough for Firefox to give me a blank page. Since Google seems to delight in trying to force people to log in to disable their misfeatures and most of the solutions are out of date, I thought I’d share what I came up with.

Please note that, in Chrome, I just disable JavaScript on Google sites and use the Incognito Window as a way to fake “Temporarily Allow” for parts of the site with no Basic Mode. (enabling JavaScript in an Incognito Window via the address bar icon will be forgotten along with the rest of your browser history) This solution is for Firefox, where I’m used to having everything Just Work™.

First, get NoScript. You can still turn off the JavaScript whitelisting using the “globally allow” option if it bothers you but this solution uses its surrogates system to patch the Google Search page.

Second, open up either your user.js or about:config. We need to create two new string keys. (Thanks to al_9x for the code I started from. I’ve modified it to also work on encrypted.google.com)

Here are the surrogates you need to add. (My apologies for the form they’re in. WordPress insisted on mangling them if I embedded the code right in the post in a prettier form.)

Killing Google Instant (November 3rd, 2011 edition) by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.