User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.18) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.5.18 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.18) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.5.18 I've thought about it for a long time and cannot think of a good reason why the Find Bar should remain open without focus, only why it shouldn't. Currently, closing the Find Bar requires one evaluate and select one of 3 methods: click on its close box, hit Esc if it has focus, or hit Ctrl+F followed by Esc if it doesn't (Cmd+F on Mac). But once the search term has been entered, there is no more use for the bar display, it only consumes page display space, which is undesirable. Furthermore, hitting Ctrl+G to Find Again and getting a failure opens the Find Bar and moves focus to it, in opposition to the conventional operation of Ctrl+G and requiring another undesirable manual close-Find-Bar procedure. Only Ctrl+F should open the Find Bar; Ctrl+G should only search. In summary, I propose: - Ctrl+F works as-is (moves focus to Find Bar, opens it if necessary) - Enter upon entering a search term moves focus to page body & closes Find Bar - Ctrl+G moves focus to page body and closes Find Bar if open regardless of success or failure (status could be displayed in Status Bar) - Tabbing/mousing focus away from Find Bar closes it Reproducible: Always

There is an existing bug for hiding the find bar, see: Bug 628179. However, there are usecases for normal search that require that the find toolbar remain open (eg searching multiple tabs for the same text), so the fix applied in that bug was backed out. Going to mark a dupe of that. For now, quicksearch does what you want, try pressing "/" to open it :-)

Also meant to add, you are using a really old version of Firefox, try 3.6.x or 4.0; they are much better!

Thanks, Ed. I'll look at that bug; I'd argue that those usecases are too rare to be driving default behavior (I search multiple tabs for the same text and still do not want the Find Bar open). I didn't know about quicksearch, and it does seem better, except when the focus is in a text field. I wonder if I can re-map Ctrl+F to quicksearch.... I'd love to upgrade from FF3.5, but see bug 544758 .

(In reply to comment #3) > I'd love to upgrade from FF3.5, but see bug 544758 . Ah fair point. To get that bug moving a bit, knowing the regression range (way back from 3.0) might help. This tool speeds the process up considerably: http://harthur.github.com/mozregression/