29 March 2006 Wednesday

What Opera has over Firefox: search within forms.

I’ve been using Firefox quite exclusively for the past monthish.

Before that I had always gravitated back to Opera, despite all of firefox’s fun extensions, etc.

Firefox was not as polished, resource capable/efficient (I typically open dozens and dozens of pages/tabs at a time, and actually would often memory leak and crash, whereas Opera was more stable for me. Firefox was also slowing up a lot and being very sluggish with loading webpages—but I recognized that this was more or less unique to my computer setup, and was not the norm for other users.

But I couldn’t figure out a way to get a BlinkList bookmarklet into Opera (current version 8.52), so I’ve been using Firefox (current verison 1.5.0.1) lately and have been quite happy.

But now I’m about to start doing web development again, and the key firefox shortcoming reemerges: Firefox does not have the capability to search within forms.

For example, while I’m typing this up in my Textpattern admin panel, I can run a search for anything in this form that I’m typing in…because I’m working in Opera. And when I am searching for a piece of php code or a selector in my stylesheet (all in webforms), I can find what I’m looking for if I’m working in Opera. In firefox, you can search all over the page, BUT it won’t return anything that’s inside a form. I don’t understand why. I’ve looked for an extension or something that’s fixed this problem, but so far no luck. Does anyone out there have a solution that I’ve just completely missed?