Firefox Tip: Begin Finding when you begin typing

April 27, 2005

Here's something a co-worker showed me today that is pretty handy. In Firefox, goto Tools - Options - Advanced - Accessibility, and check Begin Finding when you begin typing.

What this does essentially is open's the FireFox Find toolbar (Ctrl-F) for you, and begins searching when you type - as long as your focus is not in some sort of text input box or textarea.

I think FireFox's docking find toolbar in general is one of the best features of FireFox. Textbook usability - I hate it when the Find is a modal dialog that goes away, and you have to go back into the menu, or use a keyboard shortcut (different for every app) to find next/previous.

I hope software developers copy this, Eclipse for one.

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On 04/27/2005 at 4:16:37 PM EDT flashape wrote:

i love that feature, i appreciate it every time i use it. For some reason, I don't think it works on the mac though...although it's probably that i don't have the setting right.

On 04/27/2005 at 4:27:44 PM EDT Ryan Guill wrote:

Thanks! this is one of those things that used to be this way by default back in the pre 1.0 days. I still use the ' to bring it up untill now. Thanks again!

On 04/27/2005 at 5:29:08 PM EDT Bob wrote:

I've always had this disabled by default ever since I started using firefox. I agree it's an excellent little feature.

On 04/28/2005 at 12:24:06 AM EDT Steve wrote:

great feature, thanks

On 06/15/2005 at 12:51:02 AM EDT vi wrote:

if you type slash it starts find anyway. You're not a vi user are you...

On 09/19/2005 at 10:45:08 AM EDT Alan wrote:

as a side note, and as vi wrote, if you start with a slash it starts finding immediately. if you're used to forums that allow you to put bbcode or html in, make sure you don't start with the "closed quote" slash, as the find starts. as simple as this seems, I didn't realize the slash was what started it all.

On 02/14/2006 at 1:23:40 PM EST Brock wrote:

It's a nice feature, but it doesn't seem to play well with some input fields. Half the time it seems to steal focus from form inputs.

Firefox Tip: Begin Finding when you begin typing

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