topic Don’t treat ä and ö as variations of a and o in Finnish in in-page search in Discussions

Don’t treat ä and ö as variations of a and o in Finnish in in-page search

JargerBiirli — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 08:07:01 GMT

The in-page search matches a for ä and o for ö unless ”match diacritics” is selected. However, in Finnish, the letters a and ä are considered completely separate in the alphabet – ä is not ”a with dots” – and ä will never be replaced with a unless the user is stuck with ASCII or the like. The same goes for o and ö. I think that including a and o in searches for ä and ö is unintuitive for Finnish users, and very rarely what the user is looking for. These are not diacritics as far as the Finnish language is concerned.

I thus suggest that the search should not match a and ä, nor o and ö, if the browser language is set to Finnish and/or Finnish-language websites.

I'm not 100 % certain how other Nordic languages with similar alphabets deal with their letters, but at least Swedish has ä, ö and å (the latter is also used in Finnish alphabet for Swedish names), and to my understanding, they are not considered diacritics either.

Re: Don’t treat ä and ö as variations of a and o in Finnish in in-page search

jscher2000 — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 19:56:28 GMT

This was submitted to the developers a few years ago and they decided that because a lot of web pages make the mistake of substituting the letters, having Find substitute them was a reasonable compromise. I don't know whether anyone would take a different view today if you file a new bug. You can read the old one here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1647335

Re: Don’t treat ä and ö as variations of a and o in Finnish in in-page search

Kkloe — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 07:44:46 GMT

I would say this is as mentioned a big problem, I can understand that searching for "sa" in a swedish page should match så, sä, sö as example as some countries dont include å,ä,ö on their keyboard, but searching for "så" should not match sa, sä or sö especielly where you can get hundreds of hits in a page with lots of text.

sa -> should match så, sä, sö for lack of keyboard support around the world
så -> should not match sa, sä, sö as there is very specific search and leads to many false positives

Re: Don’t treat ä and ö as variations of a and o in Finnish in in-page search

Hopeakettu — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:45:23 GMT

@JargerBiirli wrote:
The in-page search matches a for ä and o for ö unless ”match diacritics” is selected. However, in Finnish, the letters a and ä are considered completely separate in the alphabet – ä is not ”a with dots” – and ä will never be replaced with a unless the user is stuck with ASCII or the like. The same goes for o and ö. I think that including a and o in searches for ä and ö is unintuitive for Finnish users, and very rarely what the user is looking for. These are not diacritics as far as the Finnish language is concerned.
I thus suggest that the search should not match a and ä, nor o and ö, if the browser language is set to Finnish and/or Finnish-language websites.
I'm not 100 % certain how other Nordic languages with similar alphabets deal with their letters, but at least Swedish has ä, ö and å (the latter is also used in Finnish alphabet for Swedish names), and to my understanding, they are not considered diacritics either.

I want to turn this behaviour off permanently from about:config or something. How do I do that? It's very annoying to have to constantly enable Match Diacritics option when searching as it doesn't seem to remember it when you close and open a browser window or switch tab.

By default the Mozilla Firefox has to make the distinction between a, ä, å, æ, o, ö and ø especially in Finnish language but probably for Nordic languages in-general as well. These are fundamentally different sounds where tongue and throat are in different position. The only justification for this might be that anglosphere user wants to search for nordic stuff and doesn't have proper layout installed on software side.

Sorry for necroing this thread but this was the first thing that search engines pointed to when searching for solution. It has become really annoying and frustrating to me.

Edit: Before anyone asks... Yes, I tried editing "places.search.matchDiacritics" but it seemingly does nothing to solve this.

Edit 2: I found it! Of course the setting was "findbar.matchdiacritics" and the integer value is used instead of boolean because why not... Ok, so turning "findbar.matchdiacritics" in about:config from 0 to 1 seems to make this thing work more like it needs to be by default.

I probably should fill in a bug because suddenly complaints from my mom about Firefox search being dysfunctional make a lot more sense. I need to drive to my parent's place and fix this for them.