Improve Firefox's text-finding abilities with Mozilla Labs Find Suggest

Firefox's text-finding abilities (Ctrl+F) have long been a bone of contention for Download Squad. Barely a day goes by without Lee strolling over to my wing of the bunker and exclaiming expletively about it. Erez even ranted about it back in July! Fortunately, Mozilla Labs' latest add-on, the latest in the Prospector series, will make things a little better: Find Suggest.

You'll need Firefox 4 to use it, but you'll be glad to hear that no restart is required! Once it's installed, just continue to use Ctrl+F as usual -- but take note of the 'suggestions' that it generates. As soon as you start typing, it shows you every word on the page that matches your search string. The only real purpose of this, as far as I can see, is that it lets you see at a glance which potential matches are on the page.

Of course, you can click one of the suggestions -- and yeah, it saves you a few key strokes -- but you have to move your hand to the mouse to click! Hopefully the folks at Mozilla Labs realise the awful ergonomic implications of such an implementation and move swiftly to allow better access to Find Suggestions... with the Tab key, for example!

Tags: find, find suggest, FindSuggest, firefox, firefox 4, Firefox4, mozilla labs, MozillaLabs, prospector, text find, TextFind