Find-and-Replace is an invaluable feature that most text-editors provide. Unfortunately while using a browser, there is no such feature available natively. I never really felt it as a missing feature as I do all my editing and writing tasks in a desktop text-editor application. However, if you use your browser for editing tasks, you might have needed this functionality at least once. Thankfully, there are extensions available for both Chrome and Firefox, in their respective repositories, that add this functionality to the browser.
Google Chrome: Search and Replace
Search and Replace extension allows you to quickly search and replace a particular text anywhere on the page in Chrome. It works on both input fields and textareas. I tested the extension on forum posts, website forms, WordPress editor and Gmail, and seems to work pretty well most of the time. “Most” because it once emptied all text in a textarea; no issues other than that.
After installing the extension, a new magnifying glass icon is added to Chrome’s toolbar. On clicking it, you will see a small form as seen in the right-side image. In it, enter the term you want to search for and replace with. Next you can choose to search text by taking its case into consideration, limit search to only input fields, and savvy users can also search using regular expressions.
Do note that text is replaced on the entire page at once, and there is no undo option available.
Install: Search and Replace
Firefox: FoxReplace
FoxReplace adds find-and-replace functionality to the Firefox browser. It boasts of features similar to the Chrome extension, with difference being it also works with a substitution list. In the substitutions list, you can pre-define certain words which has to be replaced with some other text. Substitutions are applied on the whole page, and can be automatically done on page load as well.
You can initiate FoxReplace from the context menu or by pressing
FoxReplace is a free download, and works wherever Firefox does.
Install: FoxReplace
Find and Replace for FireFox
Find and Replace is another extension for Firefox. It comes with a simple interface that looks and functions quite like a native feature.
To access the extension’s form either use your right-click context menu or the keyboard shortcut
Find and Replace can be used to replace one or all instances of a text phrase on a page. Moreover, it also supports new line replacing, which is not found in other similar addons.
Install: Find and Replace
These extensions are not something you may use everyday, but you should definitely bookmark them because you will have the need sometime for sure.
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