Control-F browser shortcut hijack FIXED

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1

Giving this its own thread to maybe get a little attention for others that noticed the issue.

What was happening:

  • Control-F was being hijacked by by Discourse to direct you to the search page.
  • You could Ctrl-F twice to get the browser window search functionality. (For me at least) that still pulled you out of the thread to the search page first.
  • Like most pages that have nominally modernized to use continuous scrolling only a limited chunk of data is buffered and searchable. The browser search just was not very useful on those pages.

What happens now (At least on Opera using Straight Dope Light):

  • Inside a thread: Ctrl-F brings up a search box with a checkbox to search posts within the thread already selected. A second Ctrl-F brings up the browser search with it’s functionality.
  • Outside a thread: The shortcut takes me straight to the browser search.

Technically that is still a hijack when inside a thread. It is now a useful hijack. The system fulfills my intent of wanting to search inside the thread. That beats the other continuous scroll websites that have nerfed the functionality of the browser search but still happily let me bring it up anyway.

@AdminModTubaDiva Thanks to you and your team. I was asking for mere consistency, even if relatively useless, and got something better than many other sites. :+1: :+1: Two thumbs up.

2

FYI - there isn’t a hijack on the Sam’s Simple Theme.

3

Sigh…and now not on either of the SD themes where I discovered the improvement. So maybe the fix got broken/left out as some other change got moved in.

So the fix I was hoping for but not the better fix I was so happy about.

4

For me, this has really been the only really frustrating change.

Right now it seems to be inconsistent depending on which forum it is? For instance a thread in General Questions allows me to Ctrl-F, but not a thread in Great Debates.

Unless there is some other difference that I’m missing.

5

Hmmm Just now both GQ and GD do not bring up the new thread search. Neither does this thread. ATMB does.

So an interesting fix seems to have been developed but implementation has a long way to go.

6

Command-F on the Mac is also no longer auto-hijacked to the board’s search engine. But I’d already mapped a different keystroke equivalent to the native browser search.

7

Yeah I was gonna comment that on my Mac cmd-F works as usual.

8

My only testing thus far is this thread, but F-yeah, my -F (⌘-F for you young’ins) is no longer hijacked!

9

[Speaking as Discourse Staff]

The length of the thread determines whether or not the Ctrl-F hijack happens. Once the thread exceeds the post count where all posts are loaded into your browser window at the same time, ^F triggers site search (for the thread only) instead of browser search.

10

That’s the other difference I was missing. Thanks!

11

That’s stupid. Interfaces are meant to be consistent, and this is not consistent. It’s bad design, and you should be ashamed.

12

Oh, and that limit is (or was) different on Android because their CPUs are so bad.