495771 - Make "Find toolbar" more easily extensible.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Find Toolbar, enhancement)

Description

[Laxminarayan G Kamath A]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009020409 Iceweasel/3.0.9 (Debian-3.0.9-1)
Build Identifier: 

Hi, my friend was trying to integrate a new search algorithm into the findbar. It took  him way more time, including my help, to search for where to put his code into, than it took him to come up with a working javascript for his search algorithm. 

So I was wondering if the find toolbar alone can be made to be much more easily extensible .. like adding one simple javascript must be enough. I know that making each component extensible in it's own right is overkill. But when it comes to find, there are so many algorithms that have been written, that are being developed, and those that will be developed. Soundex, regex (perl, grep, etc...), Levenstein, etc..  distances, the list is endless when it comes to approximate searches. Then addinng support for such approximate searches for other languages is a totally different matter(eg: my friend was trying Indic). 

I hope you find enough weight in this enhancement request.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Have you tried overriding the "@mozilla.org/embedcomp/rangefind;1" component? Not sure how feasible that is offhand, but it seems like a possible approach.

Comment 2

[Laxminarayan G Kamath A]

Yeah.. thats where my friend finally reached. I departed from the research there. But my thoughts were, "how some other search algorithm researcher could avoid all the hazzles?". Hence this idea.

Comment 3

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

This sounds like a good idea, but there's not enough concrete data in this bug to make this actionable; is overriding "@mozilla.org/embedcomp/rangefind;1" enough? Do we need to supply a JS module which allows for a custom find iterator? Is there much demand for such a feature?
If you feel this bug was closed in error, please feel free to re-open it.