Safari Edit>Find>Find highlight color

Question

Level 1

29 points

Safari Edit>Find>Find highlight color

In Safari, if I click on Edit>Find>Find, enter a word, and then click on Next, the word is highlighted in light gray. But often times when the text on the web page is small, I can't find the word that is highlighted. Is there a way to change the highlight color to yellow or fluorescent green (like in Firefox)?

I can't believe Apple ships Safari with a default highlight color of light gray.

17" intelimac 2ghz 2gb 250gb Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on May 31, 2007 1:41 AM

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Answer 1

Dah•veed

Level 9

66,655 points

May 31, 2007 6:19 AM in response to 7stud

I don't know how you can change the color. I am wondering if you perhaps have a color blindness because the highlight color is blue as long as Safari is the front window of the frontmost app (the three left hand buttons of the window are red, yellow & green.) When Safari has the front window but is not the frontmost app, then the color is gray (the three left hand buttons of the window are also gray.)
Have you tried increasing the text size? Press "" + "+" to increase text size and "" + "-" to decrease text size.

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Answer 2

-Kryten-

Level 4

1,481 points

May 31, 2007 7:47 AM in response to 7stud

Hi 7stud,

Do the following:

1. Fire up System Preferences
2. Select the Appearance icon
3. Simply click on the Highlight Colour drop down menu (second from the top) and select any colour you wish for your highlighted text.

That's it.

Kryten

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Answer 3

Dah•veed

Level 9

66,655 points

May 31, 2007 8:50 AM in response to -Kryten-

I often say that I learn something everyday here in the Apple Discussions! That does work.
Unfortunately, it is system-wide, so everything one highlights in whatever app is highlighted in some shade of whatever color you choose! I shall stick with the blue.

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Answer 4

Tim Yang

Level 2

425 points

May 31, 2007 8:59 AM in response to Dah•veed

I don't think there is a way to change that, I think what the OP meant is the grey highlight color when Safari window is not in focus.

If you use cmd-f, type in search terms and hit enter, search window closes and the focus returns to browser window then you can see highlight in whichever color you chose. But another popular usage is to hit the Next/Previous key on the search window after you enter search terms, to cycle among the results on the page. But in this case focus remained on search window, browser is in the background and all highlights will be in grey. I think Safari in Leopard fixed this by using a special purple (if I remember correctly) highlight, but I don't know of any way to do this in the current version.

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Answer 5

7stud Author

Level 1

29 points

May 31, 2007 9:10 AM in response to Tim Yang

I don't think there is a way to change that, I think
what the OP meant is the grey highlight color when
Safari window is not in focus.

If you use cmd-f, type in search terms and hit enter,
search window closes and the focus returns to browser
window then you can see highlight in whichever color
you chose. But another popular usage is to hit the
Next/Previous key on the search window after you
enter search terms, to cycle among the results on the
page. But in this case focus remained on search
window, browser is in the background and all
highlights will be in grey. I think Safari in Leopard
fixed this by using a special purple (if I remember
correctly) highlight, but I don't know of any way to
do this in the current version.

You described what I am seeing. In Safari, if I click on Edit>Find>Find, then enter a word in the Find popup window, and then click on Next, the word is highlighted in gray on the Safari page. If I close the Find window, then the highlight color on the Safari page changes to whatever color is specified in System Preferences>Appearance>Appearance. That seems like broken behavior to me--if I want to cycle through a web page to find the relevant text related to my search term, I shouldn't have to close the Find window to get the word to highlight in the specified color.

Are people seeing something else? I'm using mac os 10.4.7.

17" intelimac 2ghz 2gb 250gb Mac OS X (10.4.7)

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Answer 6

Dah•veed

Level 9

66,655 points

May 31, 2007 9:34 AM in response to 7stud

Yes, we all see the same thing that you see. When a word is highlighted it is in whatever color you have chosen in System Preferences, but when the Safari window is not, as Tim says, the focus or, as I described, the frontmost window of the frontmost app, it changes to a gray color. It isn't broken, it is just how it works in Safari and most other Apple apps.
Firefox appears to have its own protocol that it uses to Find that over rides the System-wide Apple Find protocol and uses different colors.
You are right, perhaps not the best for folks with different or diminished color perception or visual acuity.
Have you tried the key commands to enlarge the text?

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Answer 7

7stud Author

Level 1

29 points

May 31, 2007 11:25 PM in response to Tim Yang

If you use cmd-f, type in search terms and hit enter,
search window closes and the focus returns to browser
window then you can see highlight in whichever color
you chose.

Also, it looks like if you hit cmd-g after that, the search will proceed to the next matching word.

It doesn't make much sense to me why you can't get the equivalent behavior using the menus, but at least now I'll have one way to search a page properly.

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