Highlight matches in the Firefox search bar
Mozilla Firefox has a search bar which can be used to locate something on a web page , a PFD or any other text file. Firefox also offers a live search when you type a letter, it updates the matches it found. Once you have entered an entire word or phrase in Firefox search, you can press the Enter key and it will highlight the first instance of what you found.
If you continue to press Enter, you will highlight the next matching word. Now, if you want to highlight all the matches at once, there is a keyboard shortcut that can do the job.
Highlight matches in the Firefox search bar
First, open Firefox and navigate to the page you want to search for. You can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + F to open the search bar. Now type in what you want to search for and the search bar will show you the number of matches found.
To highlight all matches on the page, use the keyboard shortcut ALT + A. Once highlighted, you can use the Enter key to cycle through them all. Words are highlighted in pink and the word you are currently on is highlighted in green. Now, if you want to turn off highlighting for all matches, you have to press ALT + A again.
Likewise, Chrome does this by default. That is, when you search for a word or phrase in the search bar, all matches are highlighted. Instead of the one you selected. Firefox should be forced to do this via the keyboard shortcut we already mentioned above.
Still, there is some logic behind why Firefox does things this way. If you are dealing with a particularly large or long page. Or a page that loads when you scroll down may slow down the search function. And since the search is real-time, meaning it updates as you type, it will have to scan the entire page after each letter you enter.
Settings in Mozilla Firefox
If you prefer all matches to be highlighted by default, you can change their behavior. To do this, open a new tab in Firefox and enter the following in the URL bar:
about:config
Accept the on-screen warning to go to the preferences page. Now find the following preference, double click and change its value to "True".
findbar.highlightAll
Also, when you search for a webpage after changing this preference, all matches will be highlighted by default. You can still use the keyboard shortcut ALT + A to turn off results. Likewise, the preference simply changes the default behavior of the search bar.
