Firefox: Restore your FindBar F3 "find next" functionality after Firefox 25

Firefox has been making some great strides towards faster UI responses and usability, but one thing they changed has pissed me off to no end; making F3 "find next" exist on a per-tab basis.

What used to happen before Firefox 25

While looking for a Mini-ITX motherboard with USB3, the site I found didn't support filtering. That's ok, I'll just open up 20+ tabs in the background.

Type in "USB" to search the first tab. Found USB2, close tab. Next tab, press F3 to find again. Found USB2 again, close tab and so on keeping the tabs with USB3 open.

What happens now with FireFUX 25+

When you're searching for text on one tab, switching to the next tab will clear that search. There is no configuration option to make it persist. If you want to search for the same text on multiple tabs, you're gonna have to type it in multiple times.

Fuck that shit.

Now consider that scenario again. Open up 20+ tabs in the background. On the first tab, search for "USB". Saw USB2, close tab.

Now for the next tab, press F3 to find again BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. We're now forced to type in "USB" again. Found USB2 again, close tab and so on. It gets annoying very quickly after doing this more than 5 times.

Whatever idiot suggesting that should have been told NO. Or at least been told "make it an option" rather than outright nerfing the useful function.

Not only is this incredibly infuriating, the clearing of searches between tabs doesn't even work properly (as of Firefox 27). Sometimes your search persists, other times it blanks out, and on the odd occasion for some unknown reason it uses an even older search query.

There's hope

Every once in a while I scour the internet for a new fix to this problem. Today, thankfully, I found an extension that reverts the stupid decision made by Team Firefox. It's called GlobalFindBar by Noitidart and you can grab it without restarting Firefox.

With it you get a few extra configuration options you never got with the original FindBar; window scope (persist across different browser windows) and FindBar autofocus.

Thank you Paul O'Shannessy for ruining the internet for thousands of Firefox users, but a bigger thank you goes to Noitidart for fixing it. I can't advocate this enough. Although it's a small thing, but to me it's worth donating for.

It does the same thing the old search bar does, but better.