GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 680761
Yellow highlight for search matches disappears when repeating previous search with Ctrl+F
Last modified: 2018-08-03 19:44:04 UTC
Open a webpage, press Ctrl+F and search for a term that occurs on the page. It will be highlighted with a yellow background. Now switch to another tap (without pressing ESC to cancel the current search), then switch back to the page you did the search on. When you now press Ctrl+F again the search field has the old search filled in and Ctrl+F cycles through all the matches on that page, but there is no more yellow highlighting of the matches. This happens with epiphany master (from a few days ago) and epiphany-3.4.1-3.fc17.x86_64
s/and Ctrl+F cycles/and Ctrl+G cycles
If you switch back to the page you did the search on and press Ctrl+G (opposed to first pressing Ctrl+F and then Ctrl+G) you actually get the yellow highlight again.
In fact all you have to do is the cancel a search by pressing Esc or clicking anywhere on the page and then pressing Ctrl+F again -> old search term is filled in again but no more yellow highlight until the search term changes.
*** Bug 680799 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think this is basically a feature: Don't automatically start a search with the previous search term but give the user a change to search for something else, right? Firefox does the same, as far as I can tell. And you can still use Ctrl+G to repeat the last search right away. What is confusing here is that the last search string is inserted into the search field when using Ctrl+F. In order to reflect what's actually happening (no search is started) the search field would have to be cleared upon Ctrl+F, but that would take away the possibility to adapt your previous search. That said, I'd say the only problem that remains is that Ctrl+G after Ctrl+F doesn't trigger the highlight. Anyone having better ideas?
(In reply to comment #5) > I think this is basically a feature: Don't automatically start a search with > the previous search term but give the user a change to search for something > else, right? I think this is definetely a bug. The text is being searched, but it's not highlighted. I don't think is good to change the approach and start another search, the user would like to refine its search.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/issues/166.