Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Internet Explorer finally gets "As you type" search

Internet explorer has been my default browser for a long time. I like it better than FireFox (OMG!) and for the work I do and the websites that I visit - it works best. Only occasionally do I have to whip out FireFox to visit a "non-compliant" web-page.

Though there has been one feature that I always missed in Internet Explorer that I had grown to love in FireFox: the "as you type" search feature. In FireFox, whenever you hit CTRL+F, it would open up the find toolbar at the bottom and as you typed a word into the find box, the word would get highlighted in the browser. If there was more than one match - then you could view them via the provided buttons.

1 Firefox's search bar

In Internet Explorer (even the most recent version IE 7), when you hit CTRL+F, you get the good old find dialog that one finds in all the staple desktop applications like Notepad, etc.

2 Internet Explorer's native Find dialog

In this day and age and after so many years of FireFox's goodness being out there - you would have thought that Microsoft would have added this type of a search in its Internet browser. No such luck! Go Figure! Though the find as you search was available via a IE add-in called "findasyoutype" written by Sven Groot.

Well, today I upgraded to the Google Toolbar version 5 beta for Internet Explorer. I hit CTRL+F and what do you know - no crappy old Microsoft Find dialo5g, but an actual Find As You Type toolbar pops up at the bottom.

3 Google's Find toolbar for IE 

The find as you type toolbar pops up when you press CTRL+F, or click on the Find button 4 on the Google Toolbar. In addition the Find button's drop down lists all the words that were used to perform a Google Search. (Google Toolbar Word Find)

Google just gave me another extremely important reason to stay with their toolbar instead of using the Microsoft search toolbar.

Try the new: Google Toolbar 5 beta for IE.

All features: http://toolbar.google.com/T5/intl/en/features.html

The only feature that I don't like right now is the redesigned way in which one adds bookmarks to the Google Toolbar. Previously, it used be a normal dialog. Now its a balloon that is not rendered correctly and feels very clunky. Hope it gets a make-over or returns to the original style by the time the final version is released.

6 Save Bookmark to Google Toolbar - balloon.

No comments: