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Comment by observr9 | Hacker News Reader

>> ... 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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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

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