I am using Safari to read a long page of text. I use CMD-f to find text. I enter a search phrase. It tells me that it has found two matches. But it doesn't tell me where those two matches are. I must scroll through the page, hoping to find the highlighted text. In other browsers, the browser will actually take you to the location of the matched text. Why can't I get Safari to do this?
I've done more experimentation and made an unpleasant discovery: Safari's Find function is flaky when it comes to scrolling to the target phrase. Sometimes it does it; sometimes not. It seems more likely to fail on long web pages, but once failed on a shorter version of a page that it had previously succeeded on. After much experimentation, I am unable to determine the causal factors in the Find function failure to scroll. The conditions that I varied showed no consistent response.
I tried exactly the same pages with Chrome and Firefox; they both worked perfectly under all conditions.
Perhaps it is time to go back to one of these other browsers. I prefer to remain within the Apple software ecosystem, but when the software doesn't work, I have little choice.
Yes, it works great with short web pages. But when the web page is very long, it does not scroll to the location of the found items. So you must manually scroll through the page, looking for the highlighted text.
That doesn't scroll the page. It moves the highlighting from one target phrase to the next, but it doesn't help me find any instance of the target phrase.
I want to emphasize that this is a problem only with very long web pages with oodles of text, where finding something is especially important because I can't just scan through visually.
I just did some more experimentation and I have discovered that the Find function DOES scroll down to the found target phrase for SOME web pages, but not for others. I am now experimenting to see if the problem is with page length.
This is what I get when I do a search (text is the word). The return key moves between the matches.
Just hit the return key to tab between the found items.
How to get Safari in-page find to show results?
