Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Search and Find
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« Firefox/Feature Brainstorming
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
Search bar UI improvements
- 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
- make the bar disappear when no used, only as big as the magnifying glass and the search engine logo, when you drag something there, hover with your mouse, press ctrl + k etc the search bar should slide open to a bigger size then it currently is (there is no need for the URL bar when you are searching)
- incorporate the search inside the page bar into the search bar (see my other suggestion above as an answer to the question where to put it...)
General search/find improvements
- 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.
General Find improvements
- 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
Search as you type
- 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.
Improving search/find results
- 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
- 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)
Search plugin management
- 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.
Transient search engine plugins
- Transient assignment of search plugin to search bar
Search history
- 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
Quick searches
- URL encode quick searches (so typing "google foo+bar" goes to http://www.google.com/search?q=foo%2bbar instead of http://www.google.com/search?q=foo+bar)
spelling
use the spelling machnisem in the search bar
suggestion feature
allow to use a suggestion machnisem from one search engine on another (for example using google to suggest when searching on yahoo, msn or itunes)