Using CTRL+F to quickly seek out the desired phrase comes in quite handy as it will highlight every mention of the string within the current web page. Additionally, you can also jump throughout the results if more than one occurrence exists. Unfortunately, if the page is lengthy it can be frustrating to quickly locate the phrase even though it’s highlighted. This is perhaps tough to imagine but it’s quite true in my experience.
Users of Google Chrome have access to another visual indicator – along the right-hand window frame Chrome will indicate with a single line where the search term is located within the length of the page. Now you can quickly jump to that portion of the page and know, to the line, where your search phrase exists.
Natively, Firefox lacks this additional visualization but by installing the Scrollbar Search Highlighter extension Firefox users can accomplish the same effect. Setup post-installation is rather minimal – after the necessary browser restart the extension will automatically load it’s configuration options page.
After that, the highlighter behaves just as you’d expect as a Chrome user – just continue your normal web searching behavior. This is yet another example of how valuable the Firefox addon framework truly is.
One lone disclaimer – the addon is only compatible with Firefox 4 and later.
