For some reason, text search dialog boxes (“Find in this page”) in browsers have gotten slower and slower. It takes them ages to show up, and you get this not only in Mozilla (which uses skinnable XUL(eXtensible User interface Language)), but also in Internet Explorer (where the Find box isn’t the usual Windows one, but some weird localized, HTML-ish creature).
Anyway, I’ve noticed that in Mozilla, when I click Ctrl-F and then start typing, it starts searching for the text I’m typing in the links on the page, before the “Find” box had a chance to show up.
This feature, called incremental search, is something cool Mozilla programmers have borrowed from Emacs (it also shows up in Microsoft’s Visual Studio). So I wondered, would it be possible to make it do an incremental search of all the text in the page, not just the links?
Well, sure. Here’s the preference to set (in Mozilla 1.3):
