647473 - Find (on page) feature doesn't look at input field values

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Find Toolbar, defect, P2)

Description

[WBT]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.16) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.16) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

When using the fast find feature to search for text on a page, text that is in the "value" attribute of an <input> element isn't searched, even if it is rendered to look like a regular link. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit Facebook, as a good example.  On your home page, or a group or profile Wall, find a post that has >3 comments on it.  Verify that it has a link saying "View all X comments" where X is the number of comments that have been posted.  
2. Press CTRL+F and start typing in "View all." (Match Case option: Doesn't matter.)  

Actual Results:  
You will soon see a "Phrase not found" message (assuming it's not in the text of other comments, in which case try a different page).  

Expected Results:  
The first instance of "View all" should be selected and scrolled to.  
On inspection, I see that this text is not an <a href="function">real hyperlink</a> but rather:
<input type="submit" class="stat_elem" value="View all 4 comments" name="view_all[1]">

which leads me to the hypothesis that FF is probably just not searching <input> values. 

Use case: I am trying expand all comments and conversations on the page so that I can print out a complete version of a page as it currently stands, for any of many possible reasons.  I must manually locate all these "View all" links but then can use Find to get the "See More" links and expand those.  


I'm fairly sure this doesn't belong in the Search component as originally filed, but am not sure which component it does go in. Please correct this if you do.

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Can also be seen with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0 ID:20110318052756

Comment 2

[Kai Liu]

Firefox does search <input type="text">, but not type="submit" (don't really need a testcase; just try searching for "Save Changes" on this very page).

Including type="submit" in search will be an all-or-nothing deal since there is no good way to determine whether a button had been styled like a button, like a link, like plain text, or like something else; there are countless ways a button can be styled (or dynamically restyled), and what it looks like is very much a subjective affair.

Links can (and often are) styled like buttons and buttons can be styled like links.  The average user is not going to know or care about whether technically a button is a link or a link is a button, so I personally think that, for the sake of a consistent user experience, the two should be treated the same for the purposes of search.  But this argument of consistency did not gain much traction in bug 17754 (another issue concerning the behavior of buttons vs. links), so I don't know how well this idea would be received by those in charge of the browser module.

Comment 4

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Bug 1214091 has a testcase attached demonstrating the issue.

Comment 7

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 3 duplicates.
:enndeakin, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 8

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.