[Firefox Tip] Change Background Color of Text and Scrollbar Matches in “Highlight All” Feature of Find Toolbar

In Firefox, you can search for any desired text on any web page by pressing Ctrl+F keys together. As soon as you press the keys, Firefox launches tiny Find toolbar at the bottom of the page. You can type desired text in the given text box and Firefox will start finding the text on the web page.

You can click on the previous and next buttons to navigate between the multiple occurrences of the text or you can press F3 and Shift+F3 keys to go forward and backward through all occurrences respectively.

To exit from the Find toolbar, you can click on the Close (x) button present at the end of the toolbar or press Esc key on your keyboard.

The Find toolbar also contains a very useful button labelled as “Highlight All” which can be pressed or enabled to highlight all occurrences of the searched text phrase present on the web page.

Following screenshot shows Ctrl+F or Find toolbar feature live in action in Mozilla Firefox web browser:

As you can see in the above screenshot, the scrollbar also contains small tick marks which correspond to the location of all matches found on the web page.

This is a new feature introduced in newer versions of Firefox. It’ll help Firefox users in getting quick idea of all places where the searched term is present on the web page.

In this article, we are going to tell you how to customize or change the background color of highlighted text and scrollbar tick marks which is used by Firefox when you use “Highlight All” feature in Find toolbar.

There is a hidden preference/flag which can be used to change the default highlight color to Black, Blue, Yellow, Green, Grey, Pink or any other color.

If you also want to change background color of searched text and scrollbar tick marks in Highlight All feature in Firefox, following steps will help you:

1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the addressbar and press Enter. It’ll show you a warning message, click on “Accept the Risk and Continue” button. It’ll open Firefox’s hidden secret advanced configuration page i.e. about:config page.

2. Now copy and paste following string in Search filter box:

ui.textHighlightBackground

Since the preference doesn’t exist, Firefox will ask you to create the preference by showing Boolean, Number and String radio buttons to select.

Select String option and click on “+” button to add the preference to Firefox.

3. Now Firefox will ask you to enter a value. You need to enter desired color name or its Hex value.

For example, if you want to set highlighted text background to Black color, set the value to Black or use its Hex code #000000

After entering value, click on Save button (Tick mark) or press Enter key.

It’ll immediately change the highlighted text background in Firefox.

PS: To change the highlighted text background color again, double-click on the above mentioned preference or click on the Edit (pencil) icon and enter new color name or Hex code.

NOTE: In future, if you decide to restore default background color of highlighted text, delete the above mentioned preference from about:config page.

Also Check:

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