MacinSpot

Ok, so you have stumbled upon a web page with a whole lot of content, but you don’t want to read the entire page to find what you are looking for. There is an easy way to find what you want without having to waste an entire day scanning the site. Both Safari and Firefox have built in features that can help you speed up the process. My site doesn’t have a whole lot of content, but we will use it as an example. Here is a screen shot of my web page:



Now to find what you want. Both Safari and Firefox use the same key combination for the find feature which is command+f. You can either hit and hold command and tap the letter f, or you can go up to the edit menu and select the find feature. Below is a screen shot of where to activate the find feature in Firefox:



Simply click, “Find in This Page…”

For Safari, it is a little different though it is still in the same edit menu.



Hover your mouse over “Find” in the edit menu and a sub menu will pop out to the side. Click on “Find…” in this sub menu.

After you get the find feature activated, on Firefox a box will pop up in the bottom left corner of your browser window. This box looks a little bit like this:



In Safari the box will drop down in the upper right corner of your browser window and it will look like this:



Both browsers use the same concept. Type the word, or string of words you are looking for and then click next(or forward arrow in Safari) to search for what you have entered. The word or words you are searching for will become highlighted. Safari dims the entire web page and highlights the word or words you are looking for which I find very useful and easy to see. Its hard to read but you can see that the page is dimmed below and the word I was looking for is highlighted in yellow. Safari also highlights other words on the page in white as you will notice towards the bottom right corner of the screen shot. If you hit the forward button again, the yellow highlight will jump to the next word(currently highlighted in white) that matches your search.



Firefox doesn’t dim the page but it does highlight the words.



You will notice the green towards the center of the page. This word matched my search. If you hit next on the find box, Firefox will jump to the next word that matches your search criteria, much like Safari.

To get the boxes to disappear, in Safari you can just hit the “done” button to the right of the text field you entered your word or words to search for. In Firefox you can hit the little “X” to the left of the word “Find:” which is all the way tot he left of the search box.

This feature has come to be so handy for myself as I am always looking through forums to find answers to questions. Instead of reading the entire forum, I can just search for what I am looking for.

I hope this helps! Please post a comment on the home page of this site if you would like to learn anything specific.