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Disabling "find-as-you-type"

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I love Firefox, and I would even be OK with "find-as-you-type" ordinarily, but here's what happens: it finds the succession of letters as I type, but it cuts off the search as soon as it finds it - when I haven't finished what I wanted to type.

For instance, this site: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/06/14/kyrgyz.violence/index.html?hpt=Sbin. Say I wanted to see if the word "strategically" were on the site. You hit control-F, then start typing s-t -- and it interrupted me and found the "st" in Kyrgyzstan. But you couldn't keep typing r-a-t-e-g- .... because it interrupted the search. Sure you could hit return and find all the other instances of s-t, but that's not all that helpful! Apparently you have to type your word ridiculously fast. Or, if you were interrupted, drag your mouse back over and continue typing fast in the Find bar again.

Anyway, how can I disable this? All I want is to be able to type the full succession of letters that I'm interested in before it finds it. So I don't need to type "strategically" to find the word, but I want at least to be able to type "strate-" without having to type at a 150-words-a-minute pace. Thanks!

I love Firefox, and I would even be OK with "find-as-you-type" ordinarily, but here's what happens: it finds the succession of letters as I type, but it cuts off the search as soon as it finds it - when I haven't finished what I wanted to type. For instance, this site: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/06/14/kyrgyz.violence/index.html?hpt=Sbin. Say I wanted to see if the word "strategically" were on the site. You hit control-F, then start typing s-t -- and it interrupted me and found the "st" in Kyrgyzstan. But you couldn't keep typing r-a-t-e-g- .... because it interrupted the search. Sure you could hit return and find all the other instances of s-t, but that's not all that helpful! Apparently you have to type your word ridiculously fast. Or, if you were interrupted, drag your mouse back over and continue typing fast in the Find bar again. Anyway, how can I disable this? All I want is to be able to type the full succession of letters that I'm interested in before it finds it. So I don't need to type "strategically" to find the word, but I want at least to be able to type "strate-" without having to type at a 150-words-a-minute pace. Thanks!

Chosen solution

You are certainly not describing the normal behaviour of the find bar, which is to stay focused the entire time you're typing in it, with the matches being updated and scrolled to on-the-fly as you type.

See if the behaviour still happens in Firefox's own safe mode, if not you'll need to find the culprit extension causing the problem by disabling half of them from Tools -> Add-ons, "Extensions" then restarting Firefox to see if the problem still happens, and continue halving/restarting/testing until you've found it.

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Chosen Solution

You are certainly not describing the normal behaviour of the find bar, which is to stay focused the entire time you're typing in it, with the matches being updated and scrolled to on-the-fly as you type.

See if the behaviour still happens in Firefox's own safe mode, if not you'll need to find the culprit extension causing the problem by disabling half of them from Tools -> Add-ons, "Extensions" then restarting Firefox to see if the problem still happens, and continue halving/restarting/testing until you've found it.

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Your plugins list shows outdated plugin(s) with known security and stability risks.

# Shockwave Flash 10.0 r32
# Next Generation Java Plug-in 1.6.0_17 for Mozilla browsers 

Update the Java and Flash plugin to the latest version. See http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp#jdk (you need JRE) http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/