Highlight on selection works intermittently

[ronjouch]

Under circumstances I don't understand yet, selection on highlight (like HighlightAll used to do) do not always work.

Sometimes I double-click a word and its instances are properly highlighted, and sometimes it doesn't.

Using Firefox 29.0a1 (2014-01-04) x64 under Ubuntu 13.10 x64, feel free to ask for more debug info.

[Quicksaver]

When you double-click a word and it doesn't highlight, open the browser console (Ctrl+Shift+J) and see if there are any errors in there about FBT (more recent messages are towards the bottom), if you're in doubt about whether they're relevant, just copy them here if you want.

Also, when it doesn't highlight, do you have to restart the browser so it highlights again, or does it highlight after another try or after a few more tries?

It's also possible that another add-on is interfering with the mouse click handlers. If you could confirm that the problem still happens on a new profile or when all your other add-ons are disabled, that would be great as well.

[ronjouch]

I see no significant error message in the error console, restarting the browser doesn't help, and I am playing with a fresh profile to see.

But before that, I fiddled with the options and realized maybe I misunderstand the behavior of your addon. Coming from HighlightAll, I expected 'auto-highlighting selection instances on mouseup' a default behavior. Is it? Or is it mandatory to check the Tweaks → When Selecting Text → Fill the Findbar with the selected text option to activate such a behavior?

Also, if I do activate this option, I think I get the expected behavior, but single characters get spuriously selected once in a while oÔ. E.g. when typing the previous sentence and while I had an instance of "the" highlighted, at some point the "i" character became selected (without any mouse movement / click), causing this (png, 60kB).

[Quicksaver]

Yes, you need that preference enabled. Unlike HighlightAll which does that by default, FBT doesn't have this behavior enabled automatically, that preference is its on/off switch basically (you also need Highlights - "Highlight all by default", but that one is enabled by default).

Also, it doesn't highlight only on mouse clicks, but also when you select text with your keyboard (I'm almost sure HighlightAll did this as well, but I could be mistaken), such as when browsing with keyboard navigation enabled, or when you selected a bit of text you just wrote by hitting Shift + back arrow, which I'm guessing you must have done at some point when you were typing.

[ronjouch]

Oooh okay, that just mean properly quitting the highlighting by hitting Escape when I'm done highlighting, thanks for the clarification.

Regarding the default behavior, since HighlightAll is going to break soon and you are suggesting your addon as a replacement, maybe it would be a good idea to make this more obvious for them? (my 2cents) I don't know, maybe in the description of the addon or through a little text like "This is required to activate auto-highlighting text on selection" below the option?

Final question: is what's described by this screencast (webm, 1.2MB) expected behavior? Why did highlighting the first time first failed, but succeeded after selecting the whole paragraph?

Thanks for your addon, and thanks for the fast feedback!

[Quicksaver]

It does mention that preference is needed in the addon's page:

• Selecting text on a webpage immediately copies the selected text to the findbar and searches for it
• When used together with "Highlight all by default", it will highlight all matches of the selected text, even if the findbar is closed.

Although you are right, and that isn't the only preference that could use some clarification. I'm planning on doing a whole sweep through the whole preferences dialog and see how I can make all of it more accessible to everyone. Thanks for the suggestion!

Also, that should have worked the first selection (thank you for the detailed screencast by the way!). That is a very weird bug, but I've managed to reproduce it as well, although it's never happened to me before. I'll try to take a look at it tomorrow and I'll let you know.

[Quicksaver]

Ah, I see the bug, it wasn't highlighting when the selected text was already the same as the search query (even if it is hidden). This will be fixed in the next version.

[Quicksaver]

FYI, 1.4.17 already uploaded here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/findbar-tweak/versions/ if you want to try it early ;)

[ronjouch]

Excellent, seems to work just fine. Thanks!