New Find Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox
July 9, 2004
The Burning Edge reports on the new Find Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox that brings the much unknown Find As You Type feature to the fore, at least in terms of GUI presence. This feature has just been checked in into the branch builds of Firefox (and as such is a little buggy). To bring up the Find Toolbar, you need to press Ctrl-F or / (and then start typing).
The “Find as you type” function is not new to Firefox and has been in there for a long time. You may not have realized it before. If you have a version (or build) of Firefox that you got hold of before today, you could just start typing the word (or words) that you want to find and Firefox will incrementally find and highlight the first instance of the word that matches what you type.
Now you need to press Ctrl-F or / to bring up the Find As You Type functionality (and the new toolbar). Some people have already been screaming at inconvenience of the extra keystroke (or keystrokes if you use Ctrl-F) - I certainly don’t like it because I’m what I’d like to call an entrenched user of Find As You Type. It’s hard for me to adjust and seems painfully inconvenient. But the truth of it probably is that it’s just 1 extra keystroke and should be something one can get used to. Especially if the benefit is increased visibility of the (amazing) Find As You Type feature (which, if I may add, was first seen on the Opera web browser) - if more people knew of this productivity feature, I’m pretty sure they’d stick around with Firefox. If it will get more people using Firefox, I’m ready to compromise (or if not, there’d probably be an extension in the future which disables the new Find Toolbar).
Also new in the Find Toolbar is a Highlight button that highlights all the matching text on the webpage. No complaints against this one. Great stuff.
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Eh… Yeah. I’m one of those “entrenched” users too. Someone’ll probably come up with an extension to add it back in, anyway. Yay for XPIs :)
Posted by: Joshua on July 9, 2004 9am