It took a while, but someone finally released an add-on that fixes the most annoying part of searching pages in Internet Explorer. The Inline Search for Internet Explorer add-on replaces the modal Find dialog box with a bar that sits at the bottom of the page, exactly like the one in Firefox. As you type in your search term, it locates the first instance on the page immediately. You can find the next or previous instance using the buttons on the toolbar or by pressing the up or down arrow keys. You don’t have to click a Find button or close the dialog box when you’re done either.
I’ve been using IE7 more and more and generally prefer it to Firefox these days. I still keep Firefox around for the small number of pages that just won’t work properly in IE7.
(Thanks to Omar Shahine for the pointer, via Mike Torres.)
Ed Bott 
Too bad IE7 isn’t compatible or doesn’t properly render something like 36% of CSS attributes.
Microsoft should rewrite a fresh new plugin/addon platform and API or relaunch their existing plugin API..do some advertising and attract developers to write add-ons for IE. The only thing good about Firefox is its rendering engine capabilities and addons. The IE7 team will catch up sooner or later on standards, but as of today Firefox has a complete ecosystem of most of the web tasks a person does online with its addons. Take a look for Live Writer for instance, it isn’t exactly a world-shaking application, but quite useful with its base functions and the rich set of plugins developers are writing.
Awesome find Ed. Anyway to get the IE team to add this in for the final release?
Paul,
Too bad the attributes it does not render properly are nonexistent on the web in any substantial numbers. Need I remind you of Firefox’s poor showing in Standards Support and Acid2?
http://www.FirefoxMyths.com
Firefox Extensions are IMO highly overrated. I spend all my time simply adding extensions that now come default in other browsers just to make it useable.
Ed,
Anyway to push this to the Devs in a significant way? This is one of the few things with IE7 that was lacking. The Default search box is very weak. This inline search should be simple to impliment and the Highlight feature is very valuable. I think it would be a very big mistake to pass this up for IE7 final.
Andrew