After trying to figure out the problem of my find bar not disappearing by itself for the past 2 days, I thought that I’d document the result of my research.
There are several ways to search for text in Firefox:
- Type-ahead find: just start typing and it looks for the text incrementally
- By hitting the
/ or ' key: the find bar appears and you can start typing your search
- By hitting
Ctrl+F: again, the find bar appears and you can start typing your search
If you stop searching for something, the find bar will disappear after a preset amount of time (see the accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout setting), but only for the first two ways of searching. If you search with Ctrl+F, the find bar will not disappear.
This is a little weird that it behaves differently depending on which way you call the find bar. The Hide Find Bar extension will however make the auto-hiding work for all 3 methods.
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Ever since I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 on my Linux desktop, I had been experiencing crashes daily. As my browser has now been happily running for more than 2 days in a row, it looks like I found the culprit, and I thought I’d share the information here in case others are pulling their hair out.
So here’s what I did: I disabled TargetAlert, and Firefox is now very stable, and also faster.
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I have been using Firefox since the time it was called Phoenix. I think that the first build I used was 0.3, released in October 2002. So when I got a Mac a few months back, I naturally installed Firefox right away, with all my extensions, ad-blocking filters, etc.
But I have to face it: Firefox on the Mac is painfully slow. And it’s not just me: comparison charts and other users reach the same conclusion as me. Maybe MacBook Pro users won’t suffer from this, but Firefox on a PowerBook is far from ideal.
So I decided to give other browsers a try, which is tough as I can’t live without extensions like Adblock or Tab Mix Plus. However, responsivity of an application like a Web browser comes before features.
And it turns out that the Mac has quite a number of browsers available for it, ranging from free open-source ones (e.g. Shiira) to commercial closed-source (e.g. OmniWeb).
After giving them all a short try, I found two candidates that suit my needs and which I found very responsive:
Because SafariBlock is much easier to use than no-ads.pac (e.g. you can block Flash ads with one click), I settled on Safari as my main browser, but hacking a little GUI for no-ads.pac could be cool, especially this solution is cross-browser.
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