The new versions of Firefox come with a new feature called Find As You Type (previously known as Type Ahead Find). This feature allows you to start typing on any open webpage to search for any text. For example, you can open Wikipedia webpage for Germany and start typing demography to find this word on that webpage. You do not have to press Ctrl+F or F3 in order to being searching for a text. This makes things much easier, faster and saves your precious time when you are trying to find a specific word on a webpage. Problem is that this feature is disable by default, but you can enable it anytime you want.
Here is how you can enable Find As You Type in Firefox:
- Open Firefox browser from one of its shortcuts.
- Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Firefox will show a warning. Click on the button labeled I’ll be careful, I promise! to proceed.
- In the Search field, type typeaheadfind to narrow down the search to the preference value we are looking for. You would see a preference named accessibility.typeaheadfind as shown.
- Double click on accessibility.typeaheadfind to change its value to true.
- After changing the value, restart the browser for the changes to take effect.
Now you can open any webpage and just start typing the word or phrase that you are looking for. The searched words would be highlighted with a green background color. Only the first occurrence of the searched phrase would be highlighted. To find the phrase in the rest of the webpage, you can press F3 key on your keyboard again and again.