632307 - Opening multiple tabs and finding text in them

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, enhancement)

Description

[Yao Ziyuan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101209 PCLinuxOS/1.9.2.13-1pclos2010 (2010) Firefox/3.6.13
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101209 PCLinuxOS/1.9.2.13-1pclos2010 (2010) Firefox/3.6.13

Sometimes we face a directory of people (e.g. university faculty members) with links to their home pages. We want to find which of these home pages contain any of several keyphrases we specify (e.g. "natural language processing" or "computational linguistics"). To do this, currently we have to open all these home pages as new tabs and manually try each keyphrase in Firefox's Find Text toolbar.

Therefore, I suggest that Firefox's Find Text toolbar have an option "Find in all tabs" which searches all opened tabs for the given text to find.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Cork]

There is already an extension providing this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/find-in-tabs/

Theres an updated version in the comments.

Comment 2

[Yao Ziyuan]

Well, I think it deserves to be a built-in feature then.

Comment 3

[David Vo [:auscompgeek]]

This would be unnecessary bloat, especially since we are trying to minimialize Firefox 4.

Comment 4

[Yao Ziyuan]

It would be a great research tool. A researcher could open relevant literature in a lot of tabs and try to find keywords of interest among them.

As a tabbed browser, Firefox really should extend the traditional functionality of Find Text to the inter-tab level.

Comment 5

[David Vo [:auscompgeek]]

Think about this: searching through 100+ tabs.

Comment 6

[Yao Ziyuan]

auscompgeek: Yes, manually finding text in 100+ tabs would be a nightmare; that's why this proposed feature is useful.

Firefox already has some features that apply to all tabs:
(1) Bookmark All Tabs
(2) Reload All Tabs
(3) Close All Other Tabs

So it's so natural to extend the Find Text function to:
(4) Find Text in All Tabs

Plus, this won't be "bloat". If this is bloat, features like "bookmark all tabs", "reload all tabs" are bloat too. Also, it's very easy to implement the "Find Text in All Tabs" option: just go to the next tab if the bottom of the current tab has been reached.

Comment 7

[David Vo [:auscompgeek]]

Err, what I meant was that searching 100+ tabs would take forever, hence drawinh Firefox 4 away from its fast and slimline design. The majority of Firefox users would not use this feature if it was implemented.

Comment 8

[Yao Ziyuan]

If an operation is lengthy, you can implement a progressbar and a means to cancel at any time. Adobe Reader seems to do this.