Purpose

The Quick Find search bar in Firefox (that pops up along the bottom of the browser) has a feature whereby the slash (/) and apostrophe (') characters cause it to be activated for specialized searches. 

This feature is NOT supposed to be active while the cursor is in an editing box/field.. but sometimes the quick find gets stuck 'on' and will not de-activate itself while you are trying to enter text.

This bug has pestered me for years and now that I have finally found a solution for it, I am reprinting it here.  Hopefully it will get easier to find.

Prerequisities

This solution simply changes the two default hotkeys so they can't trigger the find bar, but there's no toolbar or menu option to do this.  Instead we have to use a 'backdoor' method to make the change. 

First, you will need to know where your firefox 'chrome' folder is installed.  In Windows it's

    C:\Program Files\Mozilla.org  ...  or something similar (like ...\Mozilla Firefox)

    In OSX they say its at
    $APP_PACKAGE_CONTENTS/Contents/

Second, you need a way to edit the .jar file.  You can use either of these methods:

   How to unzip, edit and re-zip the .jar via WinZip or 7zip

   Edit the .jar using WinRAR (free demo download)

Step by step

Open the toolkit.jar at

   $FIREFOX_INSTALL_DIRECTORY\chrome\toolkit.jar

and edit the file

   \content\global\findBar.js

   ifh note: the original post specified the following location (for MACs perhaps)
   $FIREFOX_INSTALL_DIRECTORY\chrome\content\global\toolkit.jar\content\global\findBar.js

change the lines:

   const CHAR_CODE_SLASH = “/”.charCodeAt(0);
   const CHAR_CODE_APOSTROPHE = “‘”.charCodeAt(0);

   to say:

   const CHAR_CODE_SLASH = “”.charCodeAt(0);
   const CHAR_CODE_APOSTROPHE = “”.charCodeAt(0);

   ifh note: the quotes are empty, they must not contain spaces.

save and exit.  Restart firefox for changes to take affect.

Further information

This fix doesn't disable the find bar, it only prevents those 2 hotkeys from activating it.  You can probably change the hotkeys to any printable character that you enter between the quotes.

You can always activate the find bar using CTRL-F which is actually the correct hotkey for it (you will notice it also produces the complete find bar with prev/next buttons, etc.). 

What's more is that this bug does not appear to have been fixed in Firefox 3.0.1 (latest version at the time of this writing).

Source

I got this solution from a comment by Volto that is almost lost well down the page at http://ffextensionguru.wordpress.com/2007/01/10/fx-tweak-quick-find-bar,

Thank you Volto whomever you are.