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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

I can’t solve highlighting search results in the scroll bar, and apparently I search a surprising amount and am absolutely crippled without scroll bar highlighting, so I’ll stick to Chrome until I can’t (e.g. when content blocking is crippled).

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>> ... highlighting search results in the scroll bar...

This. I find any browser that doesn't do that to be unusable. The alternative, in long documents or source code, is to blindly hit NEXT and visit all locations where a search term is found rather than scrolling quickly to see the different context regions.

I tried a plug-in or two but they were not nearly as functional as the native Chrome experience.

Glad I’m not insane, or not the only one insane. Whenever I read one of these highly-voted “I switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” post I wonder if I’m the only one searching on web pages, or if I’m the only one whose productivity is massively boosted by knowing where search results are located and how they are clustered at a glance. But then, modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience.

> modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience

Sorry, but as far as the modern browsers are concerned, we coders are a negligible market to cater for. The number of non-coder browser-users is orders magnitude higher than the number of coders.

Not saying coders are a non-negligible audience (although I’d say coders are a non-negligible segment of Firefox user base). My assumption is that the percentage of coders who value scroll bar highlighting is comparable to the percentage of those among all web users who read and search web pages of nontrivial length, since there’s hardly anything about this feature that’s specifically beneficial to coding.

This and the fact that I heard all the “switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” comments from coders, and upvoted by coders.

One thing no browsers I'm aware of does right is re-highlighting matches after clicking a link. Firefox keeps the search bar open, but you still need to re-trigger it to update the match count and highlight. Chrome just closes it, sigh, although that is a more accurate UI for the behavior.

Strangely I've never had a single use for this, next and back have been fine. What use case do you have where this is critical?

On a super long page (like forum post or comment thread, etc.), highlighting keywords on the scroll bar shows clustering of the find target and help you jump to the relevant conversation.

Getting harder to do that with all the Infinite scroll going around, #NotAFan

It is mind-boggling that people find their browser experience “crippling” without a feature like scroll bar highlighting. Is it hyperbole, or are you unable to cope in e.g., PDF readers as well? Is your line of work in visually investigating the appearance of words in 1000 page HTML documents?

Where did you get the idea that my PDF readers don’t have this feature? You might want to look into a better PDF reader... (Having a dedicated bar with results grouped by page is basically equivalent.)

Btw, I can code in TextEdit too, but I don’t because I have programmer’s text editors. Same goes for a web browser and its convenience features.

this is not the same. textedit isn’t a window into your personal life, chrome is. and because of some simple feature you’ve decided to throw away privacy. i agree with the parent here, this is ridiculous

Nah, I never managed to start using Chrome because of all the small stuff that is missing so I can clearly sympathize even if I personally dislike Chrome.

For me I cannot understand how people can choose to use a browser that doesn't support tree style tabs. I'll gladly sacrifice searcy result markers in the scrollbar as long as I have Firefox extensions.

There is an extension [0] that kinda (highlights are next to the scrollbar) fixes that. Just in case you didn’t know.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/highlightall/...

I’ve tried every tangentially related addon at least twice and they’re all pretty terrible.

I use chrome strictly for work nowadays. Hard to beat its speed and search features, like you mentioned. I'm mostly just visiting stack overflow, git repos, the occasional random site from a google search.

I don't login anywhere (including the browser itself) I don't need to for work, I don't use any extensions, and I don't mix work with personal stuff.

For anything not work however, Firefox all the way. Keep the data off google's servers as much as I can.

This. I've tried using FF for work as well but given I work a lot with Google web properties, Firefox is just a drag there. Don't know if Google's deliberately slowing it down or what but there's a very solid performance difference there.

There are such feature different people like.

A feature I cannot do without is the web developer console; much of the modern web pages are bad without it.

The older XPCOM-based extensions also are more powerful than the WebExtensions and can do many more things (I don't like the design of XPCOM, but nevertheless WebExtensions isn't very good either). Such as, I can alter the behaviour of the location bar; I don't like the default behaviour and I want it to treat my entry as a relative URL (rather than trying to add the scheme automatically or treat it as a search query), so I programmed it to do that.

there’s a difference between a dev console, which is required for web developers and something that draws a line in the scroll bar. You can easily live without the later and there are absolutely no workflows requiring it. grandparent is giving up privacy for a line in the scroll bar.

OK, although note that I am not a web developer. The dev console is not only useful for web developers, but for other users too.

TIL. So funny, I've been using Chrome since the beginning, and I've never noticed this feature, and I search all the time. I am now switching between Firefox and Chrome among various laptops, and I am impressed with Firefox. At some point, Firefox may become my dominant browser.

I afraid that day may never come

> Firefox may become `my` dominant browser.

I think you misread that

I literally just noticed Chrome did this after reading this post. lol

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