Can this Fox find stuff?

Often, I use my Firefox browser to search for some word or phrase on a web page. The keyboard shortcut is Control-F (same as IE).

Firefox opens a flat, narrow Find bar at the bottom of the browser window. This is a great improvement over IE which opens a Find window which obstructs the contents of the browser.

Clara Y in her comment on an earlier Firefox blog entry raised a good issue with Firefox: it can't search within textareas on a HTML form.

One thing I still haven't figured out from FireFox is that if I am editing a page with an editable textarea inside (eg. editing wiki page, commenting textarea on blogger), it does not allow me to perform a find (Ctrl-F) within the context inside the textarea even with focus on in the editable textarea while performing the find; on the other hand, IE has no problem with that - able to perform find on parent’s content and its context inside editable textarea.

You may try it by

1. Clicking onto "comments" hyperlink of this blog


2. Type a word that doesn't exit outside the textarea


3. Ctrl-F, and find the word you have just typed into the textarea

Clara Y also rightly pointed out that IE has no problem searching within textarea.

It is true that Firefox has some problems with HTML form fields in general, and the Find within form fields is one example. The firefox developer community is aware of the problem, and I hope a future release will resolve this problem.

In the meantime, though, you can do this: after you do a Find, click Highlight in the Find bar. This will highlight all occurences of the keywords within the textarea in yellow.

If the textarea is long, you may have to scroll up and down, and you cannot use the Find Next or Find Previous buttons.

So, this is kind of kludgy, and may not be exactly what you want, but hopefully, it will be sufficient until they fix it.