Find As You Type

I use the Firefox keyboard shortcut CTRL + F quite a lot when I try to find a phrase on a large website. While I was browsing through the about:config items I discovered an interesting option that made my life easier. The settings are called Type Ahead Find and what they do is to start popping up the find box when you start typing chars on an active website.

Don’t worry this function is only available when you are not typing into a form on the website. The key is called accessibility.typeaheadfind and is set to false by default. The Find As You Type function becomes available as soon as you set it to true.

There are several other entries that change the behavior of Find As You Type in Firefox. I would like to explain them all in the following short list.

accessibility.typeaheadfind - set this to true if you want to enable this feature.
accessibility.typeaheadfind.autostart - if set to true Find As You Type will start immediately after pressing the first key. Set it to false to activate it after pressing ‘ or /.
accessibility.typeaheadfind.casesensitive - the default value is 0 which means that all searches are case sensitive. Set this to 1 if you want to disable case sensitivity.
accessibility.typeaheadfind.enablesound - plays an alert sound if the typed in chars do not match any chars on the website. Set this to false if you do not want to play a sound.
accessibility.typeaheadfind.enabletimeout - will close the find dialog if the user has not entered any keys for a certain amount of time. Set this to false if you want this dialog to only close if you press ESC. The timeout value is defined in accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout
accessibility.typeaheadfind.flashBar - defines if the toolbar should flash whenever a match is found (1) or only when the first match is found (0).
accessibility.typeaheadfind.linksonly - set this to true if you only want to search the link text of a website. Default is false which means that all text is searched.
accessibility.typeaheadfind.soundURL - only relevant if accessibility.typeaheadfind.enablesound is set to true. Specify a path to a wav sound that should be played. Other values are beep and an empty string.
accessibility.typeaheadfind.startlinksonly - specified if the text that you are searching for in links has to be at the beginning of the link (True) or can be anywhere in the link text (False)
accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout - specifies the timeout value for the key accessibility.typeaheadfind.enabletimeout in ms. The default is 5000 ms which is 5 seconds.