There’s a few main ways to do search in Firefox. You can use the location bar to search for pages that you’ve visited or bookmarked. You can use the find bar to search for words on the page that you’re currently looking at. You can use the search bar to find new pages on the internet. As I mentioned last week, I’m taking a look into ways to improve searches in Firefox as part of Mozilla Labs, so this covers all of these types of searching.

Today I’ve quickly hacked together an initial prototype that helps you find words on a page. Instead of typing letters into the find box only to end up getting a “Phrase not found” message, the find bar will now show suggestions of words that will match on the page as you type. The find bar will only let you find words that are on the page anyway, so why not use those available words to guide the user?

Suggestion of words from the current page (buttons removed to fit screenshot)

This is similar to how mobile phones will suggest words based on the letters you’ve entered so far. Except instead of showing possible words from the dictionary, the find bar will only show words from a custom dictionary.

You can try out this feature by installing Find Suggest. It’s a restartless add-on that runs on recent Firefox 4 betas [mozilla.com], so you can start playing around with it immediately.

This is a quick prototype, so you can only fill in the suggestions by clicking on them. Ideally there would be some keyboard mechanism to fill in the suggestion such as hitting <Tab> to fill in the common prefix like on the command line. But even with the limited functionality, it’s a useful guide to quickly see what words will match on the page without having to type them out.

I’m looking into ways to improve how people search in Firefox. My previous contributions focused on getting useful pages to show up in the AwesomeBar when searching history, and I collected plenty of useful feedback to see what users wanted or didn’t want in the results.

I’ve written a restartless add-on that lets you see how you use the searchbar in Firefox. It scans through what you’ve previously typed into the searchbar and groups your searches by the words you’ve typed. The first set of results shows words that you frequently use across different searches, and the second set shows searches that you repeat multiple times.

If you’re running a recent Firefox 4 beta [mozilla.com], install the add-on, and it’ll open a new tab with your results (without sending that data anywhere). This is a restartless add-on that will also uninstall itself after it runs.

If you feel like sharing your results, please leave a comment or send me an email: edilee@gmail.com.

Unique and repeated search queries from my own searchbar history data

From my personal usage, the unique search queries set has many searches that I only do once to find out information on some topic like “mozilla” or “starcraft”. This contrasts with my repeated searches where I have terms like “time” or “movie”. I do make heavy use of keyword searches and smart bookmarks, but I happen to not have set any for these repeated searches probably because search engines like Google and Bing provide useful information on the results page.

Are your results like mine? Do you have a totally different search behavior? Any suggestions for how you would improve searching?

In designing the Firefox-facing APIs of Account Manager, thunder [sandmill.org] and I decided to make most of the interfaces take a callback/continuation. Two main reasons were 1) to allow add-ons to add extra account types like OpenID and 2) to find out if you’re logged-in to a site over multiple network requests.

For an add-on to provide a new account type, it needs to be able to tell Firefox what saved accounts are available and how to connect to them. These might need to read data from disk and/or network; or perhaps request more information from the user like a 1-time code sent over SMS. For Firefox to support these more-complex interactions, it can’t assume that a method implemented by the add-on can return a value immediately.

Asking for additional information to connect to a banking site

In this particular mockup, the site has told Firefox not to use the basic username-password account type but instead to use an account type that asks for more information. Here, an add-on has already saved the username/password and doesn’t to ask for them, but it can’t immediately connect without asking for more information, so it tells Firefox to show this popup. With the async. API, the add-on can later tell Firefox that it has finished the connect process.

The second reason for going async. overlaps with the first of supporting add-ons; Account Manager and account types need to talk over the network to other machines. These requests can take more than just a few milliseconds, so blocking the rest of Firefox when you click on the “Sign in” button using a synchronous request would be bad. In the case of finding the account status, Firefox might need to make requests for any or all of host-meta, AMCD and the session status.

The Password Manager API in Firefox happens to be synchronous—as are many other interfaces in Firefox. Converting it to be asynchronous for use in the username/password account type was fairly simple, but there’s a couple things to keep in mind: when the work is done and when the result is given.

Implementing the async. interface with the synchronous Password Manager

Here, we’ve made the call to savedAccounts immediately do the work of finding the logins, so this means the caller might have to wait before the asynchronous savedAccounts call returns. We could have just as easily delayed this work to run after the function returns by moving the logic into the async function call, but one needs to be aware that if the arguments are live objects, the contents might change by the time async triggers the callback.

The second point of “when the result is given” is less flexible. The function above could have been written to just call onComplete(accounts) immediately without the async wrapper, but that could break the caller as the implementation is no longer truly asynchronous. The caller would stop working if code is supposed to execute after the call to savedAccounts but before the call to continuation, onComplete.

Trivial example of how non-async. implementations could break

For web developers, implementing async is pretty simple as the global window object has setTimeout. So one implementation could look like function async(callback) setTimeout(callback, 0);

Making the choice of having the APIs be asynchronous does have some drawbacks in terms of code structure. Any function that eventually calls an async. function will be forced to take a callback as well, and if it needs to call multiple async. functions, the logic needs to be broken up into multiple callbacks. If you want to share variables across these callbacks, you’ll end up creating many nested anonymous functions (closures).

Additionally, some simple things like doing Array.reduce (fold), which visits each array item and applies a function to produce a single result, can get pretty complicated if you want to pass in an async. function. In a later post, I’ll describe a way to have asynchronous functions look like they’re synchronous so that you can avoid some of this callback craziness.

Since helping get Firefox Sync and Firefox Panorama into Firefox 4, I’ve been hacking recently on a neat feature called Account Manager. For end users, it makes it easy to connect to sites, and for web developers, it makes it easy to add that functionality. In the process of testing the feature, I added some basic functionality to my website in less than 5 lines of PHP!

(If you already know the details and just want the download, here they are: Windows, OS X and Linux)

An icon shows up in the location bar

If you visit my site using Firefox with Account Manager, you should see something like the picture above. By default, you get a plain image indicating that the site allows you to personalize your experience. Clicking on the icon indicates to Firefox that you want to sign-in.

Firefox asking for information to Sign In (WIP graphics!)

After successfully signing in, Firefox will reload the page. Notice that in addition to the page showing I’m signed-in, Firefox also knows who I’m signed-in as and informs me from the location bar.

Firefox and the website showing my signed-in status

What’s happening is that my site tells Firefox how to sign-in, and Firefox POSTs a request to my connect page, which just does the following:

<?php // connect.php
  $_SESSION["id"] = $_POST["id"];
?>

My site also tells Firefox how to figure out what account I’m signed in as, and my site responds as so:

<?php // status.php
  if ($id = $_SESSION["id"])
    echo "active; authmethod=\"username-password-form\"; id=\"$id\"";
  else
    echo "none";
?>

As a web developer, I didn’t need to write any HTML forms with input boxes and make sure they’re styled nicely. Firefox handles all that and makes it available from any page on my site. This is useful to blend into the look-n-feel of the user’s platform whether it be Windows or OS X or other devices like phones or TVs.

As an end user, I didn’t need to search for the fields to enter my information or find a link on the page that leads to a sign-in box. I know that I can just click in the same spot that I would click to sign in for other sites to sign-in. Additionally, I know at a glance that I’m looking at a personalized site and if I’m connected to the wrong account.

Now, if I were to restart Firefox, it has already remembered that I’ve signed-in to my site before, so signing-in is even easier the second time!

Signing-in to sites you've been to

Instead of the plain image, Firefox shows “Sign in” because it can do that for me. In a single click, Firefox will talk to the site in the background and reload the page. It’s so easy! Just one click.

Additionally, if I have multiple accounts on the site, perhaps an admin account and a user account, or if multiple people use one Firefox to visit the same web site, clicking “Sign in” will provide a list of those accounts.

No typing necessary to pick an account

You can try out this version of Firefox with Account Manager on Windows (installer), Mac OS X (disk image) and Linux (tarball). This is built on top of Firefox 4 Beta 4, so it includes features like Sync and Panorama and all the HTML5 and speed improvement goodness.

If you’d like to look into the details of how my site informs Firefox how to connect and get account status, you can take a peek at my Account Management Control Document which is linked from my host-meta. From there, you can start adding support for Account Manager to your own site!