Find

On a Mac, press ⌘F or choose Edit ▸ Find…. Find opens over the page with its search field ready, and the page stays in view beneath it. Press ⌘F again at any time to return to the search field.

On webpages. Find isn’t offered on the browser’s own pages, such as Bigfoot Home, Settings, Activity, and Article View, and it closes when one of them fills the page area.

Press Escape while you’re in the Find panel, or use its close button. Closing removes the highlights and takes you back to the page. Your search stays with that tab: press ⌘F on it to bring the search back, or use ✕ in the search field to clear it.

Normally a search belongs to the tab you made it on, and each tab keeps its own. Turn on the lock at the bottom right of the Find panel to keep one search as you move between the window’s tabs and groups.

Yes. Find stores nothing and sends nothing, so it works in Private windows and searches Private tabs too.

They set how much Find searches. Tab searches the page you’re on. Tiles searches every page in the tiled set you’re looking at, and appears only when the active tab is tiled. Group searches every tab in the current group, and Window searches every tab in the window. Find doesn’t search other windows.

Whatever is on screen: Tiles when the active tab is tiled, otherwise Tab.

Find searches only pages that have loaded. A tab that hasn’t loaded since the browser restarted is listed as Not loaded: use its load button, or Load tabs in the summary, to load it in the background and search it. A tab that is still loading is searched when it finishes, and a page that failed to load is listed as Couldn’t load.

Separate them with spaces: cat dog finds passages that contain both words, in any order. Find checks each passage on its own, such as a paragraph, heading, list item, or table cell.

Put OR between them, in capital letters: cat OR dog. OR joins only the words on either side of it, so cat OR dog food finds food and either animal.

Put a minus sign in front of it, or NOT before it: cat -dog and cat NOT dog both find passages that mention cats but not dogs. A search needs at least one word to look for; one made only of exclusions shows Add a word to find.

Put it in double quotation marks: "tabby cat" finds those words together, in that order.

Yes, with parentheses: (cat OR dog) food finds passages that mention food and either animal. Write OR, NOT, and AND in capital letters; in lower case they’re ordinary words. Find doesn’t use wildcards or regular expressions.

Only when you turn on Match Case, the button beside the search field. Otherwise capital and lower-case letters match each other. Spacing always matches loosely: several spaces or a line break match a single space.

By tab, in sidebar order. Each match shows the sentence around it, and each tab shows how many matches it has. Click a tab’s name to open it, or its arrow to hide its matches.

Click it. The page scrolls to the match and marks it as the current one; if the match is in another tab, Find opens that tab first. In the search field, press Return for the next match and Shift-Return for the previous one. Both wrap around at the ends of the list.

Every match on a page you’re looking at is highlighted, and the current match more strongly. Pages that aren’t on screen get no highlights, so no page can see what you searched for.

The page changed after Find listed its matches, so the match you chose may have moved. Find updates the list; choose the match again.

Find lists up to 500 matches for each page and shows how many there are in all. A page too large to search shows Can’t search this page.

No. Text a page has hidden isn’t searched. Text that is on the page but scrolled out of view is.

No. A match stays within one passage, such as a paragraph, heading, or list item, so a phrase split between two of them isn’t found.

Text inside frames embedded in a page, the browser’s own pages, and tabs in other windows.