Find in Firefox

Friday, November 12, 2004

Everytime I need to find something in a wepage, I hit Ctrl-F. Most applications have a dialog that opens up and allows you to search for the word, phrase etc. However, Firefox took an old feature and made it awesome. See what I mean by opening up Firefox and clicking Ctrl-F ... don't see anything? Well, look towards the bottom of the browser. A new toolbar opens up allowing you type your search phrase. The really awesome part is that as soon as you start typing, it starts finding all instances and brings your browser to the first instance. Cool man cool.

BTW - clicking enter will "Find Next" and clicking Shift-Enter will "Find Previous".

8 Comments

and...it won't only find from where you are down..it'll actually wrap to the page...god I hate that in IE..you look for something and don't get any results, only because you clicked 3/4s of the way down...

Karl - Friday, November 12, 2004 10:06:00 PM

And Ctrl-Enter will highlight all instances of your search phrase. Very cool.

Rob Gibbens - Friday, November 12, 2004 10:14:00 PM

Ohh, nice one Rob, I didn't know that :)

Matt Hawley - Friday, November 12, 2004 10:22:00 PM

For the first little while, I thought the Find feature was broken ... being brainwashed by the MS way of doing things, that is poping up dialogs, I expected a dialog to appear in Firefox as well! Eventually, I accidently noticed the find bar at the bottom of the browser one day >8P ... I know, silly me ...

While it is certainly quite poweful, developers could have done a better job of alerting the user of the location of the bar ... functionality = A+, usability = C-

ib.

Ireney Berezniak - Friday, November 12, 2004 11:37:00 PM

Totally agree, I was in the same boat as you, however it didn't take me long to find it ;)

Matt Hawley - Saturday, November 13, 2004 12:17:00 AM

Whoa! I've been using Firefox for about a week now. Very cool! Thanks for pointing that out.

Dave Burke - Saturday, November 13, 2004 7:52:00 AM

No need for Ctrl+F, just hit /

(also note that incremental find is available in VS2005)

Daniel Moth - Sunday, November 14, 2004 4:44:00 AM

Daniel, that only works if a input field doesn't have focus on the page. But yeah, thats easier to hit, however Ctrl-F is the sure fire way of "finding" something.

Matt Hawley - Sunday, November 14, 2004 6:51:00 AM

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