Firefox browser is one of the most powerful browsers out there. In fact, Mozilla Firefox was very popular even before the Google Chrome browser was introduced. Lately, Firefox was out of focus until they introduced Firefox Quantum. Meanwhile, Firefox also has one of the best collections of browser extensions. The ability to search across all the Firefox & Chrome tabs at once helps users to sift through content efficiently.
Earlier on Firefox, users could search across Multiple Tabs by using extensions like Findbar Tweak and Tabby2. However, the support for these extensions was dropped starting from Firefox 57.
In this post, we will see how you can search across all your open tabs in Firefox and Chrome browsers.
Search across multiple tabs in Firefox
Search Multi Tabs is one of the first web-extensions that lets users search across all Firefox tabs at once. The extension can be installed from here. Once installed a search bar appears on the left side of the browser. This extension appears automatically, and I couldn’t find a key to toggle it on/off.
That being said one can use the View menu of the menubar by pressing the Alt key and can also use other shortcuts such as Ctrl+B in order to open the sidebar. To begin with, enter the search term in the search bar. After searching all the open tabs, the Search Multi Tabs displays the results on its menu. The tool systematically segregates the search results and displays the hits along with the favicon and title of the page. Moreover, one can also interact with the page by using the tools offered by the Search Multi Tabs. You can use the button to reload a tab, close it or even erase the current results and start afresh.
On a related note, one can simply click on the search results to directly jump to that particular tab. Other features include an option to fine tune the results by enabling other parameters like “case sensitive”, “entire word” and highlight for the search keyword. Users can also switch to a title or URL mode, and this will also include the private browsing tabs in the results. That being said, the extension only searches pages that are loaded.
It is amazing how small extensions like this add a whole new dimension of features to the browsers. I have been using a bunch of extensions on both my Chrome and Firefox browsers. The Search Multi Tab is especially useful in scenarios wherein you want to search across all the tabs without the hassles of opening each tab and searching individually.
Search across all open tabs in Chrome
If you are a Google Chrome user and want to search across multiple tabs like how we did on Firefox, then you are in luck. The Search Plus Extension offers a similar set of functionality and is available on Google Chrome web store. The extension is of great help if you want to do a bulk search without having to skim through every open web page. I have used this extension for past few days, but the performance has only been mediocre.
This extension is not as good as the one available for Firefox Browser. If you have more tabs open, the extension fails altogether and sometimes it force crashes the Chrome browser. I also noticed that this extension doesn’t work across different browser windows and needs all the tabs to be on the same window. Despite all the downsides, Search Plus is one of the very few multiple tab search extensions for Chrome browsers. I personally hope the extension is improvised further and the functionality is fixed once and for all.
If you have any extensions to recommend, please do so in the comments.
