Hi Chuck, this could be coincident with the launch of the "per-tab" find bar with its new UI design. However, I didn't see a specific but for the change in the tracking system (Bugzilla).

If this is a major pain point for you, to help track it down, could you do a comparison between Firefox 24 and Firefox 25? You can download the Portable builds of old versions of Firefox and run them without disturbing your main installation of Firefox. (However, you might not be able to run more than one at a time.) Those two would be here:

• Portable Firefox 25.0.1
• Portable Firefox 24.0

Does it work the way you want in either of those?

Thanks for your response!

I tried 24 and 25 as you suggested, and it works like it used to in both of them. Straight quotes only match straight quotes. Since it worked for both, I tried 26 as well, and it works there too.

I then tried 27. This time it switched to the loose matching. Straight quotes match curly quotes. So we know it was something that was introduced in 27.

Any other thoughts for how to fix it in 27?

Okay, it took me forever to find this: Bug 276757 – Find in This Page should match regular quotes to curly quotes. No other characters (other than the ones you've identified) were grouped together in that change.

Regarding a preference to disable it, it was discussed, but no one made a specific case for why it might need to be disabled. You could file a new bug for that.

Before suggesting possible workarounds, is the problem general, i.e., with any web page? Or are there particular documents with predictable structure that might be amenable to a script-based solution.

Thank you for taking the time to look that up! This is a general problem that affects all websites.

It is important to me because I am an editor. As such, straight quotes are one of the things I look for to replace. Searching a page for straight quotes is an easy way to be sure I don't miss any of them.

As it is now, I have to take the extra steps of copying the text out of a page, pasting it into a text editor, and searching for straight quotes there.

At the same time, I can understand the value of this loose matching in certain other instances. A check box to toggle it on and off would be ideal. However, for my purposes, I'd rather have loose matching off entirely than always on.

This is fine when you want to search for single occurrences of text, but I think that they should make an exception and disable the fuzzy match when you use "Highlight all" to make it possible to check for possible errors as sometimes a user.js or mozilla.cfg file is posted that has Unicode quotes that won't work.
It would even be better if you could use regular expressions as is possible with the search bar on the about:config page. Then you can control this yourself with a bit more effort.

Assuming the text you're viewing is in the page and not in an editing control... I created a userscript that might tide you over temporarily. To use it, you will need to install the Greasemonkey extension, then visit the script's page and use the pale green install button on the right end of the gray bar.

• Greasemonkey extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
• Script: Character Spotter

Before and after screen shots. (Having problems with attaching images for some reason...)

Thanks so much! This is a great workaround and will help a lot. Really appreciate it! :)

I forgot to mention that you might find it annoying to have the " button on every site. You can limit the sites to which it applies by editing the script (on the add-ons page, in the User Scripts category, you can right-click > Edit or click the Options button then the large Edit button).

This line can be edited to the site you care about:

// @include     http*://*

For example:

// @include     http*://www.example.com/*

For multiple sites, add a new @include line for each one.

Thanks!