Closed Bug 185916 Opened 22 years ago Closed 1 month ago

Implement searching across tabs

Categories

(Camino Graveyard :: Tabbed Browsing, enhancement)

Product:
Camino Graveyard
Component:
Tabbed Browsing
Platform:
All
macOS
Type:
enhancement
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED INCOMPLETE
Milestone:
Future

People

(Reporter: eschew, Unassigned)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021213 Chimera/0.6+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021213 Chimera/0.6+

I think it would be very useful, and not TOO difficult to implement, to be able
to search all currently open tabs in a window, rather than just a single tab.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Ben, please explain why you feel this would be useful.
Well, I often do light online research with Chimera, and take notes as I go
along. When it comes time to do the bibliography, I have to go through all of
the tabs I've opened and recheck where each snippet of information that I'm
paraphrasing or quoting came from. Searching across tabs would be a time saver
in this situation, and I'd imagine that there would be other useful situations
as well. It would probably be toggled as a check box in the search palette.
Good idea but we must think to all the cases.
We should condense that to all pages, no matter if it's in a tab or a
single-page window.
What to do for a wrap-around + All pages or Find backwards + All pages ?
I suggest using the same methods that BBEdit to avoid creating new ones.

Mail has a 'stupid' All pages search, if you don't have the search field in the
Toolbar, it does not work at all!

Bug 160771 is to improve Find which is quite poor now.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
re comment 2: Hmm... I understand but to me it seems like feature bloat. I would
recommend WONTFIX unless there's a compelling use case for this.
smfr, what do you think?
It seems that it would be hard to make the wrapped search logic work in multiple
tabs, but I can see the utility. I'd recommend FUTURE for now, but we might
revisit this.
fffffffffffff.
Target Milestone: --- → Future
Mass-reassign of bugs still assigned to pinkerton to nobody; filter on "NoMoPinkBugsInCamino".
Assignee: mikepinkerton → nobody
QA Contact: bugzilla → tabbed.browsing
We should probably think about this again sometime soon-ish. (Revisiting whether we even care to do it is also an option.)
Hardware: Macintosh → All
I hit upon this idea independently, yesterday.  I think that this feature would be extremely useful.  In response to comment #1 and comment #4:

Use case (1)
I have 100 tabs open in one Firefox window.  The tab titles are truncated because of space constraints, and only ~7 characters of each title are visible.  20 of these tabs contain the results Google searches, 5 contain Google Docs documents, 1 contains Google Mail.  I want to switch to the Google Mail tab.

Use case (2)
I have 100 tabs open in one Firefox window.  The tab titles are truncated because of space constraints, and only 7 characters of each title are visible.  80 of 100 open tabs contain Bugzilla pages.  A colleague asks, "How's the work on that [foo] rewrite bug going?"  I know which bug he's referring to, but I don't remember the bug number or the title.  But since I'm working on that bug, I'm pretty sure it's open somewhere in my 80 bugzilla tabs.  I want to switch to that tab.

Use case (3)
I'm reading up on the [foo] of [bar].  It's an obscure topic (one that PageRank fails on), and most pages I've found through Google searches have been useless; I've only found 20 worthwhile ones.  Problem is, it takes exploration to decide whether a page is useful or useless: sometimes a useless page links to a useful one, and exploring this link graph requires a lot of tabs for each exploration.  If I encounter a familiar-looking page while traversing that link graph, I want to quickly find out if I've already come across it.  In this case, that means determining whether I already have it open in a tab.


I don't think that the Firefox UI can efficiently handle these cases today, but I also don't claim to be an expert.

I propose the following UI addition
  (1) user presses Ctrl-Shift-F/Cmd-Shift-F
  (2) window dims, search box appears in the middle
  (3) after 3-5 character have been entered into search box, a textual search is done on each tab.  This could proceed as
      (a) search titles of all tabs: tab titles matching all search terms get, say, 100 points
      (b) render tabs on top of darkened background according to points, in a "weighted map"-style display
      (c) search content text of all tabs: a tab gets, say, 1 point for each search term that's found.  Refresh weighted map of relevant tabs after searching each tab's content text.

The search algorithm is very basic, there are lots of ways to tune it.  (For example, searching all subset "phrases" of search words might give better results.)

I think the visual part of this UI could be a good use case for hardware-accelerated rendering.  There's some interesting animation one could do with this feature.

Yes, it's true that an add-on could be written to do this, but it seems to me that the performance requirements of such a feature are pretty high, and I'm not sure an add-on could cut the mustard.  But only experimentation can tell.
This is a Camino bug. You need to find/file a Firefox-specific bug if you want this in Firefox.
Hmm ... yes.  I think I'm getting in way over my head with UI stuff.
This was originally filed against Camino only because at the time, Phoenix (!) wasn't much of a story on Mac OS X.

Changing product to Firefox in anticipatory celebration of this bug's seventh birthday. Javisst ska hon leva uti hundrade år?
Component: Tabbed Browsing → Search
Product: Camino → Firefox
QA Contact: tabbed.browsing → search
Uh, no. That's not how bugs work. Feel free to file a new bug if you want it in Firefox.
Component: Search → Tabbed Browsing
Product: Firefox → Camino
QA Contact: search → tabbed.browsing
(In reply to comment #13)
> Changing product to Firefox in anticipatory celebration of this bug's seventh
> birthday. Javisst ska hon leva uti hundrade år?

We have a handful of part time volunteer developers, and hundreds of feature requests and bugs to work on. Snarky comments don't help bugs get fixed, so please leave them out of bugzilla.
Ah, I didn't realize that changing products was verboten. I also didn't intend for my comment to be snarky or provocative; my apologies on both counts.

I have contributed a small amount of code to Gecko in past years...
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 1 month ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
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