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Neowin Interview : Ben Goodger, chief developer of Firefox (Neowin.net)
Neowin.net talks with Ben
Goodger about the Firefox browser. "Firefox : 1.0. What's new
since 0.9?
Lots of things - you can now read RSS feeds in Bookmarks with our new "Live Bookmarks" feature - Feed links become bookmarks inside dynamic folders. We've made a lot of improvements to Find in page to make it less annoying and make the "Find as you Type" highlighting feature more discoverable. Extension Update is now up and running, you can open blocked popups, sort Bookmarks in the menu, and a number of other things" (Log in to post comments)
Find in Page Posted Oct 4, 2004 19:57 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] We've made a lot of improvements to Find in page to make it less annoying and [snip]IMO the changes to the "find in page" interface in version 1.0 (preview release) are EXTREMELY ANNOYING. 1) It won't stop beeping at me. It beeps whenever I type a character that is not found. I type fast, so I get a string of beeps. Is there any way to turn this off? 2) Using the '/' key to access the "find in page" bar is nice, but it tends to get unmapped just about the time I reach for the keyboard to use it again. Is there any way to disable this, or set the unmap delay to some huge interval? 3) The search text field does not appear to retain search text between uses, so I end up typing the same search phrase over and over... Together I find this all to be so annoying that I usually switch to another browser if I have to search a large document, or I copy and paste the text and search it with vi. I'm wondering, what was wrong with the 0.9 "find in page" interface? I found it intuitive and easy to use. And the damn thing didn't beep.
Find in Page Posted Oct 4, 2004 20:07 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] ...one I forgot:4) Using the [enter] key in the search text box will follow a link instead of searching for the next instance of the search text. Is there any way to continue the search without reaching for the mouse?
Find in Page Posted Oct 4, 2004 20:18 UTC (Mon) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] Is there any way to continue the search without reaching for the mouse? Have you tried control-G (for find aGain)?
Find in Page Posted Oct 4, 2004 21:21 UTC (Mon) by jag (subscriber, #3766) [Link] On Linux and Windows F3 will do the trick
Find in Page Posted Oct 4, 2004 21:24 UTC (Mon) by jag (subscriber, #3766) [Link] Btw, F3 should also take care of point 3 you mentioned. ctrl+g as mentioned above also works, as does command+g on Mac.
Find in Page Posted Oct 4, 2004 21:51 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] Yeah, these all work -- thanks to all. I forgot about F3, and never knew about ctrl-g. My first instinct was to try 'n', which of course doesn't work with a modeless interface.
Find in Page Posted Oct 4, 2004 21:38 UTC (Mon) by jag (subscriber, #3766) [Link] If you go to preferences -> accessibility, check "Use Find As You Type", and you won't have to type '/' anymore, just start typing and it'll just bring up the find bar. This can be annoying in its own ways though, so ymmv.
As for the beeping, I can't find UI for this, but if you go to about:config, you can either turn off accessibility.typeaheadfind.enablesound or make a.t.soundURL be an empty string.
Oh, and hrm, there's a.t.enabletimeout, set that to false to have the find bar never time out, or increase a.t.timeout, by default set to 5s (5000ms).
Find in Page Posted Oct 4, 2004 22:10 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] As for the beeping, I can't find UI for this, but if you go to about:config, you can either turn off accessibility.typeaheadfind.enablesound [snip]Works. Oh, and hrm, there's a.t.enabletimeout, set that to false to have the find bar never time out, or increase a.t.timeout, by default set to 5s (5000ms). Neither works. I assume this field is a 32-bit signed int, so I set it to 2 billion, but it still times out in 5 seconds. I'll keep poking around about:config... Anyway, thanks. I can at least use this now without it being a continual annoyance. I might even like it, but it's too early to tell.
Find in Page Posted Oct 7, 2004 8:15 UTC (Thu) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link] modifying the timeout works for me.\Using Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040928 From Debian Unstable
Find in Page Posted Oct 12, 2004 12:37 UTC (Tue) by jag (subscriber, #3766) [Link] Hmmm, this works for me in Mozilla, but not in Firefox PR 1. Interesting. And annoying. Yep, reading the source, looks like they have a special version of the type-ahead-find code for Firefox. Ah, there it is. They only read the value once when the browser window is opened. And they ignore the .enabletimeout pref. The latter is fine, I guess, it was a hidden pref to begin with, and by setting the timeout to something really large (MAX_INT) I'm sure you get mostly the same effect ;-) So, set it, and any new window from there on will have the benefits.
Find in Page Posted Oct 7, 2004 8:12 UTC (Thu) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link] I completely agree. I don't like that change at all.
Find in Page Posted Oct 7, 2004 13:20 UTC (Thu) by pkolloch (subscriber, #21709) [Link] I am not certain which version you are referring to.
I love the current find implementation! If I use ctrl+f to invoke search, I get the desired behavior when pressing the Enter-key.
I think that generally modal dialogs should be avoided whenever possible. They simply get into my way.
Neowin Interview : Ben Goodger, chief developer of Firefox (Neowin.net) Posted Oct 5, 2004 3:09 UTC (Tue) by carlosliu (guest, #12194) [Link] Since 1.0PR, the popup-blocker became fragile.Create a new tab and vist http://liu.net/ , then close this tab, a new ad window would popup. I also see similar behaviors from http://pcmag.com/ . Closing window wouldn't show these popup ad.
Neowin Interview : Ben Goodger, chief developer of Firefox (Neowin.net) Posted Oct 5, 2004 10:39 UTC (Tue) by Mithrandir (subscriber, #3031) [Link] I can confirm this behaviour, with the additional detail that liu.net always pops up a window, whereas pcmag.com only popped up the window the first time I visited.
Have you filed a bug report?
Neowin Interview : Ben Goodger, chief developer of Firefox (Neowin.net) Posted Oct 5, 2004 11:52 UTC (Tue) by joedrew (subscriber, #828) [Link] This is a bug which was fixed shortly after the 1.0PR was released. Major improvements were made to the popup blocker prior to PR, and popups were accidentally allowed on window/tab close.
Give the new nightly builds a try, but I believe the problem is fixed.
Does Anyone Leave It Open Overnight? Posted Oct 5, 2004 16:02 UTC (Tue) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link] My experience with basically all browsers in the Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox series has been that it is perilous to leave them open overnight. The risk is massive memory use/paging, due to some sort of defacto leaks, eventually leading to real problems. The ability to just leave the browser open is the main feature I would like to see added.
Does Anyone Leave It Open Overnight? Posted Oct 7, 2004 8:11 UTC (Thu) by lacostej (subscriber, #2760) [Link] I leave it open most of the time, without problem. On Linux.
Does Anyone Leave It Open Overnight? Posted Oct 7, 2004 13:04 UTC (Thu) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link] So do I - but Firefox does most definitely leak memory. Possibly it's just on occasions, since it can be up for quite a while before it becomes a problem, but I recently had to close FF after it started taking up 2.5GB of memory. On a system with 2GB swap and 1GB real RAM, this is something of a problem. :-)
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