I seem to spend an awful amount of time trying to make Safari more Firefoxy and Firefox more Safarii.

• fiwt- minimalist approach to FAYT
• Saft- FAYT and a lot more
• Acid Search- best Safari FAYT
• Conclusions

Find-as-you-type (or type-ahead find) works such that when you are browsing a page you type a few letters and the first instance is highlighted for you- very good for long forums where you are looking for specific information and don’t want to type cmd-G and then type in a term and then press “ok” etc… Firefox is great and has had FAYT for ages.. but i prefer Safari so the quest began for FAYT for Safari

fiwt- minimalist approach to FAYT

The first Safari FAYT plugin i came across was fiwt “find while typing”. fiwt like a number of safari extensions needs SIMBL (see note). fiwt works as advertised- you type and it finds- it uses safaris built-in find, so has the limitations of that and doesn’t have the feedback that you get from firefox- audio or the find bar at the bottom of the screen. “\” repeats the current search, “esc” cancels the find (you can also use backspace) and a nice feature “return” follows a link.

Saft- FAYT and a lot more

Saft also implements find-as-you-type and also lots of other things and unlike other hacks we’ll look at today costs money. Saft’s find-as-you-type is implimented slightly differently to the others- if you pause for too long it starts a new search- a little too quickly for me- 1 sec- cmd-G to find again. The one second and it thinks you want to do a new search is a bit annoying for me and it lacks the feedback of Firefox though it does display what you’re searching for in the Status Bar.

Acid Search- best Safari FAYT

Acid Search in action

Acid Search is the last find-as-you-type I looked at but probably my favourite. Like fiwt it requires SIMBL. It allows you to customise the highlight colour and the keys for next and previous result and has audio feedback. I think its best feature is the input bar across the bottom to see the results and edit your searches. It doesn’t seem to work perfectly unless the input bar is enabled though it only pops up when you are doing a search so it is no imposition. Acid Search also enables the customising of the google search box in Safari allowing other sites to be searched, command key shortcuts so you type a command key start entering the search terms for the search engine you want. It’s easy to add your own search engines. A great little hack and free too. Still needs some refinement for better FAYT

Firefox’simplementation of find-as-you-type is still the best

Conclusions- almost but not quite

Find-as-you-type as implemented in Firefox is still superior to the Safari counterparts- a few features need to be added: “highlight all” (showing all matches on a page) and the ability use the find as a means of making mouse-less navigation possible by the selecting of links and following them with a return.

PimpMySafari.com- everything for overhauling Safari

pimpmysafari.com is awesome. Lots of great hacks/plugins for Safari- check it out.



Other Articles:Wireless transmitting iPod Patented by Apple:
A patent from Apple gives an insight to their thinking for the future development of the iPod in November 2004.

Other Apple articles at Hrmpf.com