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Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Search and Find

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Revision as of 16:55, 28 January 2007 by CAFxX (talk | contribs) (→‎Search bar UI improvements: * shortcut to select search engine */)

« 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

  • While the focus is in the searchbar, typing UpArrow/DownArrow should cycle through the available search engines (even when the user has NOT finished entering his search string). This way, selecting the right search engine is quicker for keyboard jockeys.
  • Clear searchbar with a single click
  • Ability to manually resize the search box
  • Dynamically resizing of the search box (if the string is too long for the box, the box automatically expands to the left)
  • 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)
  • If a user clicks on the magnifier glass WITHOUT entering any strings in the box, FireFox should take him directly to the site, without any search parameters.
  • Ability to remove the magnifier-glass-icon from the searchbox
  • 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)
  • Shortcut to give focus to the search bar AND to switch to a particular engine, e.g:
    • CTRL+K > give focus to search bar (as today)
    • CTRL+W > give focus to search bar and select Wikipedia
    • CTRL+G > give focus to search bar and select Google
    • If not enabled by default give at least the user the ability to specify its own shortcuts in the search engine management dialog.
  • 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
  • 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...)
  • Search in multiple configurable engines (Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, etc) and present each result page in its own tab.
  • Ability to have more than one search box, each using its own search engine.
  • After typing-in the search string, Shift-Enter should open search-engine's results in a new tab.

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; we hope it will be revisited.)
  • Allow the user to make the search case-sensitive
  • Provide a counter in the status bar for the number of matches
  • Allow RegEx (regular expressions)
  • Allow user to search ALL pages at once (not only the current page).
  • 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 should be put in a NEW tab (not the same 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
  • Quick Find separate from Find
  • "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
  • Close the Find bar with Ctrl+F. This allows for quick opening and closing of the bar via a single shortcut key.
  • When finding a word that's not visible on the screen the page is currently scrolled so that the highlighted result is on the bottom line. In many cases it would be better to scroll slightly further so that text below the result is also visible. e.g. when finding comments from a specific user in Fark forums I always have to press the down arrow several times after pressing ctrl+g (find next).

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
  • Display a different Highlight color for the last keyword found on a page (current visual cue "Reached end of page" in Firefox 2.0 is puny)

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)
  • Ability to choose different search engines within the right-click menu option [Search <engine> for "<phrase>"] without changing the search bar selection
    • perhaps a submenu where you can choose a single search with one click but can select multiple search engines by holding down CTRL or ALT when selecting to open in individual tabs

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.
  • Ability to rename search plugins.

Transient search engine plugins

  • Transient assignment of search plugin to search bar

Search history

  • Browseable search history : For example using Up and Down arrows to navigate through search history (only when cursor is over search bar for avoiding conflicts with scrollbar-like usage of up and down arrows). Nedit (http://www.nedit.org/) handle search history this way and it's very efficient.
  • Seperated not recorded searches on search history "What did i searched for on the java issue
  • Autocompletion with terms in the history

Quick searches

spelling

Use the spelling mechanism 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)

Add search engines via right click

  • add a "Add this search engine" menu in the right click menu

(example extension at references)

Search in context menu

  • change the search in the context menu have a pop up of all installed search engines and clicking the menu goes to the default search engine.

 

(example extension at references)

(example extension does not have the default search engine feature)

References

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