Firefox Handly Feature - Web Page Search

Recently I wrote an blog entry on Firefox, and a commenter indicated that Firefox was an incredible tool in which Microsoft's IE 7 was a tool that made things harder to do.

Well, here is a concrete example of the difference between IE 7 and FireFox.

When you are on a web page and hit control-F to find text on that page what happens?

In IE 7 (and previous versions, this functionality appears to have avoided update) a small dialog window pops up over your page covering some of the text you are going to search. You type in what you want to search for and the page scrolls to the text and moves your search window down. It highlights the text, but it isn't entirely what I want in a search tool. You can close the search tool as necessary to stop it from blocking the text, but to start up the search again you have to control-F to bring it back up.

Firefox will perform actions that at first you might think are similar to the IE 7 way of handling searches.

Firefox will open an extended status bar, with an entry box for your search text. You type in to it what you are looking for and hit next. It scrolls the web page as necessary and highlights the text. You can hit the next or previous button as necessary to continue your search of go back to a previous search hit. The search bar on the browser does not block any text. It stays at the bottom of the screen waiting if you need it again - it need not go away for you to read a paragraph of text.

It is a vital difference (to me) in blocking or not blocking text when I'm performing a search on a web page. Why? Because I fully expect to read the paragraph where the hit happened to determine if what was found is what I need or if I have to search again. On the IE 7 model (or just IE for the past 10 years...) this involves more actions on my part to clear up the text to read what I'm looking for - either moving the dialog window or closing it completely. This works out to be a huge annoyance when what I was reading turns out to not be what I'm looking for and I have to re-open the search dialog.

So, definitely, score 5 points to Firefox for the previously mentioned session recovery capability. Score another 2 points to Firefox for making text searches of web pages easier.

Score: Firefox 2 - 7 , IE 7 - 0 .

Firefox Browser - Continued Innovation - vs IE 7

I first wrote about the FireFox browser in March of 2005. Since then I typically install it on all of my Windows PCs (but not the Macs, Safari is good enough in that realm).

There are still some disturbing problems with the browser. Most of these problems, I suspect come from web pages that support IE only. Since IE added multiple tab browsing the scales have tilted back towards Microsoft's IE 7 if it weren't for one very special attribute of FireFox.

I've been having some trouble with one of my PC's. It needs a bios update, but it has Pheonix Bios, and you just can't download any update, it has to be one for your specific motherboard and I don't remember what it is. I'll take a look at it sometime and see if I can figure it out.

The end result is that this machine crashes, typically in multimedia operations. No blue screen, no - hey you might want to save before the ship goes down, just down and bounce in a reboot instantly.

FireFox, which I've been using for the most part, has a way to recover sessions. The best part of it is that all you have to do after starting FireFox in order to recover your previous session is click a button.

This is particularly handy in that even in cases where I've been writing in a text box in a tab, this information will be saved (not in every case, though). It remembers your cookies, and even if you were logged in to Comcast e-mail.

This is powerful stuff. I think there is even a setting for it to remember your session even when you just close the program. I'll think about that one, there could be benefits and detractions to it.

But in terms of saving the information as I was writing an entry on IIDB forum, boy it saved me a lot of anger and frustration. Saving frustration is important to me. IE7, doesn't do this, or at least not yet.

I noticed when IE 7 came out that Microsoft employed a neat way to close the tabs. FireFox, you had to move your mouse all the way to the right edge of the screen to close a tab. Microsoft had it right on the tab. Shortly afterwards, FireFox fixed this. It certainly seems a lot like one-upsmanship, but FireFox really did something useful with the session recovery.

Good job guys, it is nice to see programmers to go, since I am at least in part a programmer.