Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Search and Find

Search integration

Integrate search with Firefox settings
Integrate search with sites on open Tabs
Ability to automatically or choose to open new tabs with new search queries
Integrate search with Archiving and Offline browsing
- Integrate search with bookmarks/history search
- Integrate browser search with desktop search
- Spotlight-like functionality

One-click clear searchbar
Resizable search box
Ability to remove the magnifier-glass-icon from the searchbox
The box may extend as needed or be set to a new static size so users can see more of the searchbar content.
Keybindings: While the cursor is active and in the search bar <UP> moves the cursor to the start of the search string, and <DOWN> moves the cursor to the end.
When dragging text to search bar, mouse over search engine should show list of search engines, and allow dropping text onto one to search that engine
User defined hotkey to the search field (if it not already exists)- (try ctrl+k)
Some kind of history like linux terminals have using arrow keys up and down
Search bar should allow the user to search for a string matching only a whole word.
Ability to highlight search terms in a document like with the Find bar
Allow the search bar to be collapsible so that hides itself unless you mouse over it

Contextual searches -- for example: token01 within n words/lines of token02
Associate keywords to search plugins
Ability to use one keyword for multiple search engines, each opening in their own tab (e.g. "CD Name" gives me 5 shops in 5 tabs)
Ability to highlight text and from the right click context menu send the text to any of the search engines you have installed (bug 248173 has been WONTFIX'd; hoping it can be revisited.)
distinction between uppercase/lowercase
counter for the number of occurrences
take into account regular expressions
search one page/all pages
Context Menu web search: Currently we have "Search Web for x" where x is the highlighted text. The DictionarySearch extension adds up to four options for searching the web, so that, for example, I can search Answers.com, Amazon.com and Wikipedia. The search results are in a new tab.

Integrate find as a "search engine"
Find should start searching from the last "clicked in" frame first. Take the java api doc site [1] for example. If one clicks on the main frame and searches on "applet" it should find it there before the sidebar to the left. Compare Firefox's behavior to IE.
Pre-populate ctrl-F with searchbox contents (Bug 264123)
Pre-populate ctrl-F with selected text (Bug 250910)
Tab-modal find bar
Find integration points for web applications
Add marker (+, -, <, etc) to scroll bar to emphasize location of found text
Give user ability to choose whether to display Find bar at the bottom (near the status bar) or at the top (above the page content). (Bug 254687)
Add a button next to the Find bar marked flash that flashes the highlighted text whcn clicked.
Ability to use Find on multiple tabs/windows
Add "Find backward"
Make "Highlight all" an about:config boolean
Add "Find Whole Word Only" option
Add wildcard capability (such as ? for individual letters, * for any number of letters, etc)
Have an option for the Find bar to auto-hide when clicking links, changing tabs, after a set period of time, and other similar situations. This would need to include the option to enable or disable each situation separately

A search as you type feature like the one in Flock that drops down a "box" when you type but a lot more customizable and with more features.
- Determine the size of the box, in, pixels, % of the screen size and how many words/characters that will be shown
- Determine the opacity of the box
- Decide what search engines that will be listed in the box and how many results of each
- Preview of every result like the GooglePreview extension but in the box
- Scroll in the box with options: always, when needed, never
- Decide if it should be a default search engine or search results from several search engines
FAYT should ignore symbols that could not actually be typed from the keyboard, at least the lowest ASCII ones.
- Genius NetScroll optical mouse may generate
- « ♠ » and « ♦ » symbols
- (they appear in the uppermost Firefox window) when 4th or 5th mouse button is pressed. This happens when Back/Forward history navigation is controlled via the mouse (symbols are ASCII 4 and ASCII 6, they're somehow created inside Firefox, as they are somewhat equivalent to «Alt+Left arrow» and «Alt+Right arrow», or vice versa; must be a side effect of Alt+<code> method of typing arbitrary ASCII on the numpad); Firefox history reacts o.k. (moves forward and back in browsing history), but the FAYT bottom line should not popup and/or add those symbols to its search field.

Ability to change color of highlight - yellow highlights on a white page isn't easy on the eye!
Ability to specify "invert" rather than a specific color maybe?
Ability to enable search matches to flash.
Ability to enable the entire line containing the search text to be highlighted.
Not only the color of found word(s), font weight also could be changed. (e.g. highlight the line and make the found words bold on it)
Implement popout-prism-like navigation. It seems to be more effecient than common search navigation when looking for specific keywords on the page. (Popuot prism details)
Give user ability to show all results for a search or find in a sidebar list.
- Allow user to show/hide sidebar when performing find.
- Allow the user to change the default behavior (show/hide sidebar) in options
- Ability to highlight separate words (with different colors) from phrase being searched
Concordance style search results for whole search scope, sortable by relevance

Multiple search boxes, each with its own color.
Ability to add/remove extra search boxes
Ability to specify multiple engines to search simultaneously, with each set of results in its own tab (the search icon could be individual or icon x/icon y)

Ability to change search engine/plugin via keyboard
Ability to organize search plugins better
Ability to group plugins in to nameable folders/submenus or somesuch (all shopping searches in "Shopping", tech sites in "Technical", etc.)
Ability to remove search engine addons from search box easily
To the extent reasonable, unify search plugin interface with bookmark interface: they both do many of the same things
No longer require an extension to add/remove search engines. This should be accomplished by simply copying the appropriate URL to a list like done in Galeon and AcidSearch for Safari.
Ability of search engine configuration saving to/restoring from a central server
Ability to create search engine, and to associate keywords to them like in opera.

Browseable search history
Seperated not recorded searches on search history "What did i searched for on the java issue
Autocompletion with temrs in the history