368742 - Find in this page does not refresh when a new page is opened.

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Find Toolbar, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Andrew]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1

This bug is the same issue I reported in bug 267025 in 2004, however since times have changed in new versions of the software have been released I decided to open a new bug rather than reopening the old one that had been closed for inactivity.  If someone would rather open that one, feel free.  Rather than refreshing on a new page, the find toolbar continues to be red if a search term was not found on a previous page.  Given the way many website spread over multiple pages this can be confusing.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open www.google.com
2. Search for "sports"
3. Click on news

Actual Results:  
The search bar has not changed even though this word appears on this page.

Expected Results:  
Either: Turn back to white to indicate the current page has not been searched

or

Search and find the word "sports" on the new page.

I was using Windows XP when I originally reported this bug, I am now using Mac OS X 10.4 however I have no evidence this behavior was changed in Windows, or would be different in Linux so I listed this bug as impacting all operating systems.

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

I think it is not handy that the findbar should clear the search term every time when I open a new page.
Imagine, I do a Google search for a certain word. I that case I would need to type the same word over and over in the findbar when I want to search for the same search term in every page.
It would not be handy either if it scrolls automatically to the first occurrence of the word after loading the pages. Normally I first want to see the beginning of the site, because I want to know what site it is and if it is important enough.

Comment 2

[Andrew]

I think I was unclear I meant that the bar should change from red to white again so that it's clear the search had not been performed on that page, not that the text should be removed.

Comment 4

[Aaron Racine]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/2007051502 Firefox/2.0.0.4

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/2007060204 Minefield/3.0a6pre.

I was able to reproduce this.  The background color of the find bar text box remains red, and the "phrase not found" error remains in the find bar, even though you're looking at a page that contains the phrase in the find box.  A screenshot of that situation might look confusing.

I'd think searching the new page for the phrase in the find box could bring up some unwanted performance issues; removing the red background and the "phrase not found" error seems like a better solution to me, fwiw.

Confirming and changing this to an RFE.

Comment 6

[Benjamin W. Slivka]

I independently discovered this bug today.

I believe the correct behavior is to execute the search on every new page opened as long as the "find on this page" search bar is open.

Why?

Because that is what a user would expect.
Example:
a) I use site search at http://si.cnn.com to look for "Northwestern"
b) I get a set of hits, and click on one of the links
c) The page is long, a "visual grep" doesn't locate "Northwestern", so
d) I press Ctrl+F, type in Northwestern, and learn it is not on this page (nicer than what IE does, BTW).
e) So I click on the "next page" link (as this article has 4 pages)
f) I've kept the search bar open, so *a priori* I'm wanting to continue to search for "Northwestern".

I don't see a big performance issue with this implementation.
And if the user doesn't want the search to happen, she can close the "find on this page" bar.

Thank you!
--Ben

Comment 7

[Andrew]

New versions of Firefox have not fixed this behavior.  If it's helpful, Safari 3 on OS X handles this by simply removing the search bar on each new page.

Comment 9

[B.J. Herbison]

A variation of this problem is refreshing the current page with the Find bar open. The page contents may have changed, but the Find bar search results (both the color of the text box and the "n of m" count) are obsolete and should be cleared unless verified.