Firefox 2 Has A Spell Check! Yea, it really does.

[brcmville 0]

You are probably thinking from the get go that this is something that I should be discussing in the software forums, but honestly, it is something that I just discovered and its something new that I just learned, so it fits right in here as well. At least, technically it does!

 

Anyways, I loaded up my Mozilla Firefox browser a few days back and an upgrade notice popped up. Normally, I don't think I have enough time to deal with the download and installation part so I just close it down without upgrading, but not today! Instead, I upgraded the browser and it took me about 1-2 minutes. So much for taking up all of my time right? When it got done downloading, it said the updates will take effect when I restarted the browser, so I closed it down and reopened it.

 

The first thing I did was come to these forums and when I was making my post, I noticed that the words I misspelled had a line under them, just like in Microsoft word. So, I right clicked and lo and behold, a list of possible words came up!

 

For people like me, a spell check is a must, and this is probably one of the best discoveries I have made for quite a while

Edited March 25, 2007 by brcmville (see edit history)

[Quatrux 4]

Well, this Discovery of yours was available for some time now and personally, I was using Opera which had this feature for a long time, but I like the Opera browser method much more, because when you want to check spell you usually just choose it from menu, because not always I want my words to be spell checked in the textarea, due to I post on forums not only in English language, but in other languages too, so using Firefox with that feature on sometimes is annoying. ;)I always am thinking, why couldn't browsers use a built-in textarea which would have its own undo button and similar options? Due to sometimes it is really useful and those javascript ones sometimes is slow and they aren't available on every site.

[brcmville 0]

If I had known that Firefox had this feature for so long, I would have upgraded much sooner. I cannot believe that I have been so deprived... (And spelling weird as "wierd" for years)

[pyost 0]

Well, look at that I must have switched this feature off some time in the past, since a large part of my posts isn't in English. If that weren't the case, I'd probably be using it all the time. However, when I'm at Xisto or some other English-speaking board, I tend to use the spelling check Google Toolbar has - by clicking only one button, it checks all the text entered on page in different text boxes. It is good because there is no on/off setting, so you can use it only when you want. Actually, I used it right now

[vizskywalker 0]

I really didn't begin to appreciate that feature until recently. My college has several e-mail lists, some of which are slightly formal and official. It's so much easier to have Firefox run spell check on my emails as I write them than to have to manually click a spell check button. And after getting chewed out a couple times for forgetting to spell check, those red lines are a friend of mine. It does annoy me how they hate my name, and anything relating directly to code though.~Viz

[Omkar™ 0]

Well, 2 months back, I should be saying, "Yeah! It sure does!" Anyway, it was much of a nice discovery, and one of the very few ones that are actually helpful!

 

It was a sad thing though, that Firefox 1.5+ didn't have an extension for spell-checking! I remember there was only one SpellBound™, but it didn't match the standards of a Firefox extension! For all these years (ahem, true to be exaggerated for a couple of months) I was using the Google Toolbar to spell-check my web forms.

 

Adding yet another dimension to the 'betterness' of Firefox2! Keep up the good work, dear Mozilla!

[brcmville 0]

Until I upgraded to Firefox 2, I wouldn't have really considered a spell check that big of a deal because I figured my spelling was just fine and it would be more of a nuisance than anything else. If anyone hasn't tried it for similar reasons, they are seriously missing out.I am not a fan of Google Tool bars because they usually come packed in with some other software and install on your computer without much notice or even any. It really makes me mad when I load up internet explorer and I have Google tool bar installed when I clearly didn't install it willingly. My computer never has any pop-ups either, so the entire bar was pretty much useless for me.

[vizskywalker 0]

The one thing that standpoints me about the spellcheck is that it only applies to text fields. There is no way to spell check a web page or to spellcheck a text box. I mean, I see (and have made) more typos in titles of threads that could easily be fixed with spellcheck. Granted you can right-click the text-box to enable spellcheck, but it's so much of a nuisance that I never do.~Viz

[Orca239 0]

Spell check is a pretty good feature to have in a web browser, especially considering some of the people you run into that takl leik thiz, lol. It's not a big enough deal for me to switch to FireFox though. I tried FireFox a while back, and couldn't stand it. I don't see why so many people are so... passionate? about it. (Weird thing to be passionate about btw, lol).

[brcmville 0]

I am not passionate about Firefox, but I really do enjoy using it. I have seen what you have seen as well though. All of those people running around promoting Firefox like it was a religion. There are many features that are far superior to internet explorer so my guess is thats the real reason people are so passionate about it. I was reluctant to switch from internet explorer but when I learned how to make use of tabbed browsing, I was hooked. IE 7 came out with it but it seems so clunky and doesn't work so well for me.I just figured out that you can turn off the spell check like two minutes ago, which is weird. ;)So much for the argument that it gets in the way when typing in a different language; all you have to do is simply right click and turn it off!

[BuffaloHelp 24]

Open your Firefox to about:configChange layout.spellcheckDefault to following value options:0 to turn it off completely1 to check only in textarea2 to check textarea and input box

[vizskywalker 0]

Yay! More Firefox config settings. One day I'm going to just go through all of the different configuration options in Firefox and see what they do. In the meantime, thanks for this one Buffalo.~Viz

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

Spell check, for me isn't really useful because when I type in names, it actually ticks me off.gnutux

[brcmville 0]

Spell check, for me isn't really useful because when I type in names, it actually ticks me off.
gnutux

As they say, One man's trash is another mans treasure... Not everyone is going to like it, but it is more useful then it is bothersome

[vizskywalker 0]

If there are names you commonly type (or any other word that spellcheck complains about) you can simply right-click the underlined text and select add to dictionary. Then it won't bug you about them anymore. I don't, however, if later you can remove things from the dictionary.~Viz