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

[JargerBiirli]

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.

[jscher2000]

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

[Kkloe]

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