It appears like Microsoft’s contributions to the Chromium project is going to benefit a lot of web browsers based on Chromium. A new incremental feature has been introduced in the Canary version of Chromium-based Edge that allows you to easily search for text on a web page.
Till now, in order to find a text or find occurrences of a text in various places in a web page, we had to type the search term that appears in the text box upon pressing Ctrl + F or heading to Find in the browser settings. That behavior is going to be simplified as the browser will directly take the selected text and will paste to the search box without needing the user to manually do it.
This might sound like a minor change but it will change the user experience on a basic level. As of now, the feature is available on Edge Canary and Chrome Canary. I have personally checked the feature on both the web browsers and it felt much better than the current implementations.
“Currently, the find box only considers its own history when opening, but sometimes the user has selected a term on the page and wishes to search for additional instances (especially when looking at source code.) To expedite this (and prevent needing to use the clipboard), this change considers the active text selection (if any) when the find
widget is invoked.“, reads the commit message on Chromium Gerrit.
The feature is readily available in the Canary builds which means you need not go through the hassle of searching and enabling any of the Chrome flags to get the feature. In case you are not aware of, you can easily switch to the next search occurrence by pressing Ctrl + G. Take a look at the below video I recorded to watch the feature in action.
At the time of writing this article, the feature is not present in Edge Dev channel. I hope the feature does not cause any stability issues and gets mature enough to be added in the next update of Google Chrome.
So, what do you think of this new implementation? Let us know in the comments below.
Download Chromium-based Edge Canary | Download Chrome Canary
