Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Search and Find

« 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...)
• Search in multiple configurable engines (Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, etc) and present each result page in its own 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; 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)
• 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.

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)

References

• Change Search Engine Via Keyboard
• Search for whole words only
• bug 274432
• Visual feedback on text/link find
• bug 298127
• bug 328613