552304 - Improvement Suggestion: New Find Bar

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 384458

(Toolkit :: Find Toolbar, enhancement)

Description

[Axel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; de; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; de; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6


Finding text in a HTML page is sometimes very onerous with Firefox.

In particular it's quite disturbing to see the HTML page to scroll somewhere but not to see where the found term actually is on the page...

So I'd like to suggest three improvements to the current Find interface:

a)  Find should only "find" visible portions of text. If the text resides on the HTML page but is hidden due to CSS, DHTML features or otherwise hidden, it should be regarded as not found.

b)  Particularly on gaudy pages like http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/ it's almost impossible to see what has been found by Firefox. (Try to find the term "event" on that page. You'll get nuts.) I suggest to dim the web page content, e.g. by applying a greyscale filter, in order to emphasize find results.

c)  Find should not only consider capitalisation but also provide an option to "match whole word".


I know there are already similar bugs filed on each on these issues separately. With this suggestion I'd like to create summary on the old ones and also suggest a slightly updated Find bar: Instead of showing command icon + text, I suggest the Find bar to only show icons. The corresponding command text should be displayed when the user hovers about the command with the mouse:


To sum it up, the Find toolbar would look something like:

X   Search: |___________________|   ˅   ˄   //   Aa   |W|   ☼


Meaning:

    ˅        "Downwards   (ALT+D)"
    ˄        "Upwards   (ALT+U)"
    //       "Highlight   (ALT+H)"
    Aa       "Match case   (ALT+C)"
   |W|       "Whole word   (ALT+W)"
    ☼        "Dim other text   (ALT+M)"

In this suggestion, all icons are locking state-buttons (remembering state) except for Upwards/Downwards, which are action buttons that perform a search when clicked.


In the Attachment section please find a short animation showing the suggested effect on "Dim other text".



Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
The Find bar should

 *  not find hidden text
 *  provide a "Match whole word" option
 *  dim down web page content (e.g. by applying greyscale
    filter on content) to better emphasize find results.



For a discussion on this topic, please refer to:
http://groups.google.de/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/browse_thread/thread/981cc58d332ceba5/6672c00c55c0473f

Comment 1

[Axel]

Attachment: Animation demonstrating the suggested "Dim other text" find option and new icon-only style.

Comment 2

[Axel]

Attachment: Animation demonstrating the suggested "Dim other text" find option and new icon-only style.

Comment 3

[Axel]

I just saw that the current Opera Web browser has implemented a search dimming behaviour similar to the one I suggest. It seems to be a reasonable way to implement a web page search like this.

Comment 4

[Art K]

As long as we're talking Find Bar mods, I would really like to see these two as they would be huge time savers:

1) Implement a drop down history menu for the find text

2) Implement a single click toggle icon to open/close the Find bar. It is a PITA to move the cursor to the top of the window to the menu bar, click on Edit & then Find - a long traverse & two "clicks" just to get started. A toggle icon on the status bar would minimize mouse movement and enable hiding the Find bar to increase viewable screen area when done. 

At the very least, add an entry to the View menu to toggle the Find bar.

What would be really cool is to implement user assignable Firefox functions to custom icons on the status bar. This would involve:

 (1) an easier mechanism to add custom icons to the "customize toolbar" window,
 (2) enabling icon drag & drop to the status bar, and
 (3) a mechanism to associate a user icon to a menu bar function. 

Similar to the bookmarks toolbar for links, it would be a function toolbar for commands. Then, for example, I could assign View | Toolbars | Findbar to a custom icon, drag it to the status bar and I have my suggestion #2. Millions of us users would save countless hours on our frequent tasks.

Comment 5

[Kevin Brosnan]

Bugs are a poor place for discussion, with comments like comment 4 it becomes possible to loose sight of what the bug is really about. If you want to discuss the interface of Firefox see https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-usability

Comment 6

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

The ideas presented in this bug is already covered by bugs like bug 269442 and bug 384458, which are more actionable than this one.