• regular expressions are good for finding patterns in text 1
    • some people have both the desire and the time to write large amounts of text, which is then published on the web
    • copious amounts of text are a problem to impatient programmers armed with regular expressions
  • helpful internet denizen published browser extensions to search webpages with regular expressions
    • has a fatal flaw
    • keyword “find” is configured to hijack omnibox entries and route them into the extension
    • makes any legitimate search engine queries that begin with “find” require special handling
      • catches you by surprise and snaps you out of flow!
  • tweaked the configuration to use “find+” instead
    • signed Firefox2 version can be found here
  1. …as imperfect as they may be 

  2. as a privacy advocate, I use Firefox