Find in Page [LWN.net]

Find in Page

Posted Oct 4, 2004 19:57 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137)
Parent article: Neowin Interview : Ben Goodger, chief developer of Firefox (Neowin.net)

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.

(Log in to post comments)

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.