How to show search result positions on scroll bar in Firefox?

Chrome shows positions of results from "Find in this page" on the scroll bar (see the orange lines on the scrollbar on the right). How can I enable the same feature in Firefox (72.0.2)?

Solution 1:

It's now possible in Firefox 87.

However: it only works for web pages and not for PDFs, unlike in Chromium Edge for example.

References:

• Firefox 87.0 release notes

The “Highlight All” feature on Find in Page now displays tick marks alongside your scrollbar that correspond to the location of matches found on that page.

• ghacks article
• Firefox bug tracker

Thought it might be fun to implement this during the break. With the above patches, the tick marks are drawn in a window's scrollbar using the highlight colour which defaults to something magenta-like. Note that the 'Highlight All' toggle on the findbar needs to be on for the tick marks to appear.

Solution 2:

You can use the HighlightAll extension. Go to about:addons and choose Custom highlighting and Show search markers. Then visit any page and make a selection (e.g. by double clicking a word). This is not the same as in Chrome, but should cover many use cases.

The license is GNU GPL 3.0 There is no public source code repository, but the source code can be inspected by extracting the xpi, as it's a zip file. Fortunately, the core add-on and libraries source files are well-organized and not minimized.

Solution 3:

As stated above, highlightall still is the only addon around today (FF 72) that handles this.

It still requires the mentioned rights:

• Access your data for all websites
• Read the text of all open tabs
• Display notifications to you

I STILL wanted to give it a try, so I started testing it... it does not "work and feel" as the native highlighting in e.g. Chrome or Vivaldi.

1. in order to get the highlightall addon working, you can set a shortcut in the options (Ctrl+f8).

2. You do not get highlightall working via "Find in this page" (Ctrl+f) or an own dialog BUT you simply double-click on any word on a page in order to find other occurences - actually nice after getting used to it.

3. more than one color can be used which is also quite handy.

4. Other than stated above it is open source (GPLv3, see ff addon page above). Still I do not know how to get get a look at the code - neither on the the highlightall homepage nor in my local ff profile. Maybe contacting and nicely discussing this with the author could solve this.

For me this is "close enough" so I will stick with it for now - with the Ctrl+f8 option enabled.