monline

Firefox can display the contents of an XML file in a nice tree view. I use this feature regularly to browse through large (> 100K) XML files, because Firefox is always open on my desktop and it's easy just to drag&drop the file into the browser window. Unfortunately the "Find" (Ctrl+F) functionality breaks in case of XML. I did not try this with smaller files (only with a few ~300K files) thus I do not know whether it is inherently broken or it just fails to work with larger files. Try it yourself.

You can easily get XML files from the web, eg. all RSS feeds are some sort of XML. The RSS feed of BoingBoing is a good example, because it's quite large, most of the time it's above 100K. Download the feed into a file, open it in a text editor (something that is capable of editing pure text files) and strip away the <?xml-stylesheet ... ?> tags at the beginning of the file. Now you can open it in Firefox and start experimenting. I could not find a consistent pattern on how it works (or does not work). Eg. a Ctrl+F search did find a few occurances of the word "copy", but not all and I could not tell why it found some and why not the others. There must be some deterministic logic behind it, but it's definitely not working as an average user would expect.

So beware: Ctrl+F in Firefox is not to be trusted in case of XML files.