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With current Firefox and since 2005 exists an issue for some with finding text in a page.

If you are searching for text in a page and reach the bottom the search will wrap to the top. This in itself is not a problem, but a combination of design decisions has created a problem for some users.

  • Search will wrap upon reaching bottom of page
  • No popup/dialogue is show to notify the user
  • No sound is played to notify the user
  • The Reached end of page, continued from top message only displays until Next is pressed

This combination of decisions forces users to check the toolbar after each search to make sure not to enter an "endless search". What setting/Add-on could be used to fix this problem?

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2 Answers 2

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The Noise add-on can fix this problem.

Make sound responses while events happen.

It will play a platform-dependent beep when Findbar wraps.

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  • The add-on description now says that the functionality to trigger on Find Wrapped events (noise-TypeAheadFind.FIND_WRAPPED) is unfortunately only available with legacy Firefox < 57 versions.
    – glenneroo
    Sep 15, 2020 at 22:18
  • @glenneroo if you have an alternative, I can offer a significant bounty
    – Zombo
    Sep 16, 2020 at 1:04
  • I opened a duplicate question without seeing this one first: superuser.com/questions/1584097/… There are unfortunately no answers and it actually ends up linking back to your question indirectly via Bugzilla ;)
    – glenneroo
    Sep 22, 2020 at 11:42
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A great solution would be asking the user whether to continue searching on wrap (like the Okular PDF viewer) or pausing for some milliseconds before proceeding. I did not spent too much time on figuring that out, so I made a workaround.

The issue is visibility. Some versions earlier (before Firefox 26), Mozilla decided to make the search bar text brighter (at least on Linux). This makes it almost impossible to notice wraps because there is no audio feedback or anything.

The workaround is make the status text more visible:

Screenshot

To get this effect, you have to create a chrome/userChrome.css file in your profile folder. Append the following rules to the chrome/userChrome.css text file:

/**
 * Makes wrapped content more visible. http://superuser.com/a/691490/47108
 * http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/content/widgets/findbar.xml
 * http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/themes/linux/global/findBar.css
 */
.findbar-container .find-status-icon[status="wrapped"] {
    display: none;
}
.findbar-container .find-status-icon[status="wrapped"]
    ~ [anonid="find-status"].findbar-find-status {
    font-weight: bold;
    background: #FFA6C9;
    color: blue !important;
}

The URLs in the comments are for reference, just in case something breaks after an update and the rules need to be updated.

For (at least) Firefox 80.x and above, userChrome is disabled by default, therefore the following changes must also be made:

Open a new tab and type in about:config. Search for 'userprof' and double-click on toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to set it to True. Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

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  • Still works in Firefox 46.0.1.
    – Lekensteyn
    May 20, 2016 at 9:39
  • Still works in Firefox 80.0.1.
    – glenneroo
    Sep 15, 2020 at 23:40

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