397898 - "Find in page" should be in the middle of the screen, use animation

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 171237

(Toolkit :: Find Toolbar, enhancement)

Description

[Jon B]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7

Search for text on a page, using the quick find bar, F3, or the like:

Reproducible: Always

Actual Results:  
If the next occurrence of the text is on the screen, it will be highlighted with a green background.

If the next occurrence of the text is *off* the screen, the position of the page will be repositioned instantly so that the next occurrence is at the very bottom edge of the screen.

This has a number of problems:
1. When the highlighted text is at the very bottom of the screen, you can't read beyond it without scrolling further manually.  Sometimes this ends up in a cycle of F3, scroll a bit further, F3, scroll a bit further, ...
2. "Teleporting" instantly from one place to another on the page makes it hard or impossible to keep track of where you are, especially on very long pages.  You also have to watch the scroll bar to know if you are going down the page or if you've wrapped around and started at the beginning again.
3. Simply highlighting the text is not always enough to make it visible.  Especially on dense pages, the highlight may occur in an area of the screen where the change in color goes unnoticed, requiring you to search with your eyes anyway.

Expected Results:  
Instead:
1. The screen should be scrolled so that the highlighted text is in the (vertical) center of the screen, instead of the last line.  (If at the beginning or end of the page, you could scroll "past" the edge of the page, leaving empty space beyond it or something?  Like the way the iPhone bounces when you try to scroll too far?)
2. The scrolling should be smooth and animated (though still fast), so that the eye can follow how much the page has moved and keep track of position.
3. The highlight itself should be animated in some way, so that the eye can easily find it on the page.  I'm imagining that the highlight would "jump" from one place to the next as you press F3, like the bouncing dots on a sing-along, because eyes are really good at tracking movement.  But at the least, the highlight should slowly cycle in brightness or color or something.

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Duplicate of bug 171237 ?

Comment 2

[Jon B]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Duplicate of bug 171237 ?

It's the same as putting the search term in the middle of the screen.  This bug could be more about the animation, then?

Comment 3

[Kevin Brosnan]

Bug 405485 is already marked new. The bug is titled "bounce" / "have movement" on find, in addition to highlighting covers the other half of this bug. As this is still unconfirmed it should be marked a dupe of ethier that or 171237.