Type and find it

One of the really powerful things about Firefox is the many community members who write extensions that add lots of functionality and gee-whiz features to the browser. Not everything is in the add-ons, however. The generic browser itself has some pretty neat feature if you spend a little time customizing it.

One feature is not completely obvious from the options menu. (For PC's start with Tools / Options. For Linux and Mac, start with Edit / Preferences.) Navigate to the Advanced section and look under the General tab. You will see some Accessibility options. One of these is for "Search for text when I start typing." It comes unchecked as its default, so go ahead and check it. Close the options/preferences window.

Now you are ready to try it. Start typing the word options. You will see Firefox start to highlight its first occurrence on the page. Press the F3 key and Firefox will jump to the next occurrence. Try it several times, then use shift-F3 to go back the other way. Also note that Firefox has opened up a small window in the bottom left of your browser screen. The word you are searching for appears there. You will also see icons to help you go forward or backward, as well as to highlight all instances of the word (or words) you are searching. This same menu can be pulled up using the Edit / Find menu. Similarly, you can cycle through your searches using the ctrl-G and shift-ctrl-g key combinations. Firefox is rarely content with giving you only a single way of doing something.

Not only can you use the F3 and other keys to cycle through a page to look for your term, but when you navigate to another page you can do the same thing without re-entering your search.

You can use find features in other browsers, but I don't know any among the standard ones that offer as much power and as many options as in Firefox. If you haven't been using Firefox, try it and find out why it has the reputation for being so much faster, more secure, and more powerful than IE/Internet Explorer.