8 Ways to Sunday

Not long after upgrading to Firefox 1.5, I noticed a really annoying problem — I couldn’t type a forward-slash character (“/”) into a form field without invoking the browser’s Find dialog. Since I type a fair bit of HTML into browser forms, this was a big problem. Update: Some people are still experiencing this bug in Firefox 2.0, and I’ve received comments indicating that the fixes in this post still work in 2.0. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

A little googling around showed that I’m not the only one to notice this bug, so I thought I’d post my solution here.

The fix in four steps:

1. Type about:config into the Firefox address bar and hit the Enter key (or press the “Go” button). This will take you to a special advanced configuration screen.
2. Your cursor should already be blinking happily in the “Filter” text box. If not, click in that text box and type “typeahead” to narrow the options down to only those relating to the Find-As-You-Type feature.
3. Check the line that begins with accessibility.typeaheadfind.autostart. This controls whether the browser will start searching text on a web page as soon as you begin typing, without having to first invoke the “Find” dialog by pressing Control–F or typing a forward-slash. I had disabled this feature in the Firefox options, but for some reason this value was set to “true.”
4. If accessibility.typeaheadfind.autostart has a value of “true” on your machine and you’re experiencing the same bug I was, try double-clicking that row in the about:config interface. This will set it’s value to “false,” which solved the problem for me.

If you try this on your own computer, please let me know if it works. I’ll submit it to Bugzilla if I can get confirmation that this wasn’t just a quirk with my installation.

Updates

• 5/14/2006 @ 7:34 PM — A reader going by Kaph found out that the find-as-you-type bug was being caused on his computer by a file called user.js (more info). Since the about:config interface only alters the prefs.js file, the fix I suggested in this post didn’t work for him. Advanced users may want to try examining and editing user.js if they can’t restore the correct find behavior by using about:config. Be sure to back up the file before you make any changes, of course.

  If you aren’t comfortable editing JavaScript files, the first thing you should do is confirm that user.js is the source of the problem. Move the file out of your profile folder, restart Firefox if it’s currently open, then apply the fix I described above. Now restart Firefox once again to see if the fix “takes” this time. If so, then settings in your user.js file are over-riding your prefs.js file. Describe the situation to a technically-minded friend, and ask if they can help you out by altering the user.js file for you.

• 1/27/2007 @ 5:10 PM — A commenter named Winter has determined that this bug can sometimes show up because of a conflict between the HTML Validator extension for Firefox and recent beta releases of the Firebug extension. If you’re experiencing this bug and have both of those extensions enabled, try disabling one or both of the extensions to fix the problem.

  This issue may go away as Firebug leaves beta and reaches version 1.0. It’s also worth noting that other in-browser validators, such as that offered by the Web Developer extension, don’t have this conflict. Web Developer doesn’t offer the same “instant” validation feedback, but validation-on-demand is good enough for most people.

• 5/1/2007 @ 12:30 AM — Mike Youell reported that the ClipMarks extension was causing this problem for him. Uninstalling the extension fixed the bug in his case.