Solutions for the FireFox Bug: single quote or slash causes find box to open

Published by Sara Jacobson
Jul 4, 2006 02:53 PM under

A very annoying ‘quirk’ has been creeping up when I use FireFox. Sometimes when I start it and type a single quote (’) or slash (/) causes the Find dialogue to open at the bottom of the browser.

At first I thought it was a conflict with the ‘Find as you type’ option, so I turned that off in Options. The quirk returned a few days later.

Then I thought it was just some conflict with another program. Sometimes switching to another window would fix it, sometimes not.
Then it disappeared entirely for a few days and I was overjoyed. Then, this morning, the cat came back

I’ve found a link that explains it in more detail and his solution seems to work for many. Unfortunately it didn’t seem to fix my problem :(

I did find a quirky fix here that involves opening, then closing the clock dialogue in your taskbar. This seems to reset the focus in FF so it stops behaving badly.

Comments

1 Adam Messinger - Jul 10, 12:34 AM

Hi there. I’m Adam, the guy whose site you linked to in this entry. I don’t see a date on this page, so I’m not sure when you visited. If you haven’t been back in awhile, however, you might be interested to know that another possible solution has been discovered and documented on that same page.

One of the commenters on that entry discovered that the source of the problem on his computer was a file called user.js, which is intended to hold user-specific program settings. Anything in user.js overrides settings in the standard-issue prefs.js, so if you have a different setting for type-ahead find in user.js it won’t matter one bit what prefs.js or your options dialog box say the setting is. Confusing, no?

Anyway, my original post has been amended to include instructions on how to determine if user.js is causing the problem. One of my comments to that post also has instructions for trouble-shooting extension-related problems with Firefox, since that could conceivably be another source of trouble.

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