Facebook Plunges Again
Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
Dear Firefox, please fix the crappy Find UI already
Firefox is doing a lot of usability-related work recently. And really, it now sports a fairly usable UI. It's kind of sluggish at times, but it is my browser of choice, mainly for political reasons.
But one thing never fails to piss me off ... why does the Find function have to be so bad?
Many people use large monitors these days (and often, more than one). This means that we often have a large mass of text all over the screen, but we want to find just a single word. This is a common function, and both Opera and Chrome have taken major strides in order to make it usable.
Not only is Firefox's native Find unusable, I couldn't even find an extension that emulates Opera's far superior functionality. And if you're wondering what I'm talking about and why is it so different, just keep on reading after the jump and see screenshots of all three modern browsers doing a Find operation on the same Wikipedia page. You be the judge.
Firefox
This is our baseline for this comparison. What you're looking at here is a standard Wikipedia page at default zoom level on a 22" monitor. Can you see that word I'm searching for? It's way down there, at the bottom. If you look for it carefully, you can spot it now. But how easy is it to spot the next instance when the cursor jumps to it?
Firefox only highlights one instance of the word every time, and just jumps to the next when you hit Enter again. You then have to visually scan the entire window again and hunt for the highlighted text; sometimes this is easy, and sometimes it's really hard -- depending on the layout and the selection of colors on the page. Even MS Word 2010 does better than this, and it's not even a browser (I mean, it's meant for writing rather than reading).
Chrome
One step up is Chrome's interface. The major change here is that Chrome highlights all instances of the word on the current view, so you can easily see them at a glance. With Chrome, it doesn't feel like the text focus is jumping all over the screen. You know where it's going to go. Another nice touch (which you cannot see on the screenshot) is that the scrollbar shows nice, bright indicators wherever the word appears, also outside your current view. So if there's another instance of the word way down the page, you can instantly tell even before you jump to it. This is a nice, predictable interface.
Opera
And finally, Opera really sets the gold standard for Find. As with Chrome, the text you're looking for is highlighted, and the current instance is "extra highlighted". But one major difference is that as soon as you hit Find, the page dims. This way, every instance of the word really pops out and is super-visible. No way you're going to miss your text with Opera.
So Mozilla, whaddya say? With Firefox 4 coming out soon, is there a chance for one more UI fix?
Comments
35
Subscribe to commentsBigEJul 13th 2010 4:58PM
Ctrl F, hit "Highlight All"
Am I missing something?
MSaherJul 15th 2010 9:35AM
my exact thought, I can't believe the author did a whole piece just because he missed the "highlight option"
byroni00Jul 13th 2010 5:59PM
How have I missed that feature for so long! Thanks :)
MunkyJul 13th 2010 7:26PM
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. This article = FAIL.
Information CentralJul 13th 2010 8:56PM
Also a failURE for griping about this while the pathetic, unresizable bookmarks dialog has gone unresolved for YEARS.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418864
brbbbJul 14th 2010 12:21PM
Funnily enough, until about a year ago, Firefox was pretty much the winner in terms of "Find"ing, and one of the big reasons (far from the only reason) why I couldn't use browsers like Opera because: 1) the Find bar wasn't a bar but a window and 2) (something I like about Firefox which even now Opera and Chrome don't do) you can highlight a word and press ctrl+F and it's instantly in the Find box.
Anyway, Firefox's "Find" function is far from unusable, even if it could do with improvement and I actually prefer how it does it (highlight+ctrl+F) to the others.
SteapsJul 13th 2010 5:13PM
Where's the Safari comparison? I feel Safari has the best 'Find' feature by far.
IgnignoktJul 13th 2010 8:16PM
Agreed. Safari dims the screen, all occurrences of the query are not dimmed, and the currently selected word is surrounded in Yellow. Also, when you click "Next", the next occurrence jumps out little for emphasis.
Some screenshots to sort of illustrate what I mean:
Just switched words: http://cl.ly/1dxk
And normal: http://cl.ly/1dvg
Information CentralJul 13th 2010 8:48PM
Typical Apple inconsistency: They field a decent Find in their browser, but their computer-search functionality sucks the big wad. Finder's (and Spotlight's) failure to start searches in the selected folder (or even OFFER to do so) and failure to show WHERE hits are found are a continuing embarrassment to Apple. Or it would be if Apple took any pride in improving their products instead of insisting there's no problem.
alahmnatJul 13th 2010 9:32PM
@Information Central
Use Snow Leopard. It can default to searching in the selected folder in Finder as a preference. Also, if you turn on the path bar it will show you where the file is when you select in in the results view. Nice impotent rage though.
ragtagJul 14th 2010 3:13AM
Actually, I hate the dimming thing in Safari. I would much rather just have it highlight the word I'm looking for, because normally I want to read the text around the word I'm searching for too, and dimming it doesn't help. It looks nice, but is less useful.
SteapsJul 14th 2010 4:39PM
@ragtag Then once you 'find' the word you click it (or anywhere on the screen for that matter) and it un-dims the screen.
Atle IversenJul 13th 2010 5:28PM
Dimming the page is a huge usability improvement which works great in Opera, but to be fair I think that Safari for OS X was first with this.
We have taken this one (or two) steps further with PpcSoft iKnow; in addition to dimming the page AND highlighting the current match,
- we've "stolen" the CapsLock to activate the incremental search
- we show the total number of matches AND which match the current is
- we let you jump back and forward using the arrow keys (in addition to F3/Shift F3)
- you may quickly reset the search by using the left arrow
- you may auto-complete the current search-word using the right arrow
- you may double-click (or select) a word and press CapsLock to activate search and find and highlight all occurrences instantly
RariJul 13th 2010 5:29PM
Your screenshot doesn't include the scrollbar (and for Firefox, it really doesn't matter, does it?) but Chrome, when using Find, lines appear on the scrollbar to mark the relative location of the found items, which can be incredibly useful on longer pages with a lot of text.
Really, just being able to make "Highlight All" on by default in Firefox seems like it would solve this issue. There is an add-on called HighlightAll which can perform this task by clicking on a word to select it or using a keyboard short when a word is highlighted (you need to fiddle with the options before it is remotely usable) but this just seems like a lot of extra work for something that should be standard.
cmsb55Jul 13th 2010 6:30PM
"lines appear on the scrollbar to mark the relative location of the found items"
He mentions this in the article. Try reading it next time.
xabbottJul 13th 2010 5:32PM
So you want "Highlight all" on by default and page dimming. Because aside from the page dimming Chrome and Firefox's find seem the same.
segJul 13th 2010 5:38PM
There is a cool button on the Firefox "find" bar. It's called "highlight all." You press it, voila! All of the text you are looking for on the page is highlighted bright purple. Just. . like. . Chrome.
/hrmn
ZackBoeJul 13th 2010 6:01PM
I would REALLY love it if the Find dialog could be closed with anther hit of Ctrl + F
ZackBoeJul 13th 2010 6:49PM
Didn't know that, but also my esc is very tiny and not to comfortable to hit
Information CentralJul 13th 2010 8:54PM
"not to comfortable to hit"
What?