How To Enable “Search For Text When I Start Typing” Feature in Mozilla Firefox?

Many times when we are browsing through a web page, we need to search for some text. We can use “Ctrl+F” keyboard shortcut to launch web browser’s Find box and then start searching for desired text string.

Personally I do a lot of text search and most of it is done while replying to readers’ comments. When someone asks a question, I do a search in AskVG website to get the link for a tutorial which contains the solution.

Pressing “Ctrl+F” to initiate search becomes annoying when you need to search frequently. To overcome this annoying problem, Mozilla Firefox provides “Quick Find” feature which allows you to quickly find your desired text by pressing / (slash) key or by pressing ‘ (apostrophe) key to search in hyperlinks only.

You just need to press / (slash) key and then type the desired text and Firefox will take you to the first occurrence of the text string. To further search, you can press “F3” or “Ctrl+G” keys to go to the next occurrence of text string. You can also use “Shift+F3” or “Ctrl+Shift+G” keys to go to the previous occurrence of text string. You can press Esc key anytime to close the Quick Find box or wait for a few seconds until Firefox automatically closes it.

If you want to search into hyperlinks only, press ‘ (apostrophe) key instead of / (slash) key.

But still we need to press / or ‘ keys to launch Quick Find box. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just start typing in a web page and Firefox automatically starts searching for it and takes you to the first occurrence of text string?

Today in this tutorial, we’ll tell you how to enable this cool feature in Mozilla Firefox which allows you to search for text as soon as you start typing the text.

So without wasting time, lets start the tutorial:

1. Open Mozilla Firefox, click on the Firefox Menu button and select “Options“.

2. It’ll open Firefox Options window. Now go to “Advanced” tab and enable “Search for text when I start typing” option present in Accessibility section as shown in following screenshot:

3. Click on OK button to apply the changes.

That’s it. Now whenever you want to search for something, just start typing the text and Firefox will automatically search for the text and will take you to the first occurrence of search string. As said earlier, you can use ‘ (apostrophe) key to search into hyperlinks only.

Also Check:

[Tip] Disable Quick Find Feature (‘ and / Hotkeys) in Mozilla Firefox