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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Search dialog vs. search bar
From:       ra1n <pk20it () yahoo ! it>
Date:       2005-02-16 16:53:21
Message-ID: 4213887B.2020602 () yahoo ! it
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Jason Keirstead wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 February 2005 2:33 pm, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> 
>>Now I have fould out that Firefox too has this functionality, and does
>>indeed work this way. The toolbar also has some additional fields, just
>>like a linearized search dialog.
> 
> 
> The search bar in Firefox has a number of large, glaring problems.
> 
> - It is at the bottom of the screen rather than the top. This is not so bad, 
> once you are usaed to it. but if this is the first time you have ever 
> searched in this browser, and you are expecting CTRL+F or Edit->Find to bring 
> up a search dialog, it is a *bad* place for it to be. The first time the 
> introduced this new behaviour, it took me probably 2 minutes to figure out 
> what was going on (I did not see the box at all ). 
> 
> This is mistake is compounded by the fact that the bottom portion of your 
> browser window is quite often not even on the screen, so you hit CTRL+F, only 
> to find you then need to grab the whole window with your mouse and move it to 
> see the bar (assuming you even know the bar is there!)
well there is a good reason because it's not placed on top, it will 
cover the top of the page as explained by some other one on this 
thread... it covers the page even at the bottom, so I don't see the 
reason to keep it at the bottom, it could be placed on top, and make the 
page scroll if a searched term is hidden by the search bar, it gains 
visibility, and keeps the good usability of the firefox one
> - It does not automatically remve itself after you are done searching. Now, I 
> realize that it is hard to know *when* you are done searching with this setup 
> (with a dialog, you just tab to 'Close'), but IMO this is another serious 
> flaw. Basically, you can't get rid of this dialog easily once you are done 
> with the search, you need to *again* grab the mouse and click the X. Either 
> that or hit TAB a million times to reach the close button (because you are 
> searching, so the text focus is currently inside the browser window)
This is because the firefox search it's not a dialog, it's dynamic 
search, it search terms while you are typing, this differs from known 
search dialogs (like gnome, kde and windows ones) where you type a term 
and hit search, and I think that the firefox search has a good 
behaviour, in fact, you bring it on screen by pressing Ctrl-F or / (like 
vim in fact it behaves exactly like vim search) you search a term that 
gets highlighted (or you could usa an option to highlight all terms 
instead of the first one) then you could get rid of it or clicking in 
the document window (or on a link) or closing it by pressing the button, 
or pressing ESC on the keyboard, so despite the placement, seems good to 
me, it provides good navigation even keyboard only (you could search for 
more occurrences of the term by pressing enter)
> 
> - Because the search is no longer a modal dialog, other modal dialogs coming 
> from the browser will **actually inturrupt the search**
You mean a connection error for example? but this seems easy to fix, you 
could make it remain in it's place when the dialog pops up
> 
> - No way to search backwards without, once *again*, moving your hand to the 
> mouse.
what you mean? you could search backwards in the page by pressing 
shift+enter
> 
> Now, I am not toally against the idea of asearch bar - I really love the one 
> in KMail. but I don't think that the one in Firefox should be used as an 
> example. It is probably the worst search tool I have ever used in my whole 
> life.
Again despite it's placemente, it's one of the best search tools I've 
ever used
ps I've forgot, the highlight option could be reached on the keyboard by 
pressing ctrl+enter, so it's fully usable with keyboard only

Cheers

Luca

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