Primordial Ooze

Does anyone know if there is a Firefox extension which enhances the built-in Find/Search features in Firefox? It would be particularly useful to simply allow the “Find in this page…” feature to specify a regular expression. You could then inch through the document that way and/or highlight matching terms.

Of course, the flowing nature of a web document would provide some challenges to regex, or at least the user’s expectation on how it should work.

Take for example the beginning of line and end of line expressions. What do they mean on a web page which can flow differently based on how wide the window is? If you’re viewing a log via a web server than the meaning is clear, you break on newlines/line breaks. If you’re viewing a complicated web page, you’re probably better off breaking on paragraph marks or DIV tags. The user might now be aware of these and perhaps expects to break searches as they are visually layed out. If that’s realistic, it would mean a simple checkbox in the UI (but perhaps more challenging to implement from the extension API as I’m not sure it’s clear to the extension writer where the soft breaks happen). Otherwise, the UI would remain pretty much as simple as it stands now.