Firefox 2.0 Feature Preview: Inline Spellcheck

Robert Strong created the SpellBound Spellchecker for Firefox and Mozilla Suite (now known as Sea Monkey) extension which enabled users to have a web based spell checker. He also part of the development team for Firefox 2.0. When Firefox 1.5 came out Robert created a ‘developmental version’ of SpellBound which was an inline or spell as you type of spell checker. The inline spellcheck is suppose to be one of the new features in FF 2.0.

I’ve had an opportunity to try it out. Right now it is only working for pages that have a text-area fields such as Yahoo!Mail. However it does not work for pages using I-Frames for entering text. This includes the Firefox WYSIWYG Editor for Delphi Forums, the Blogger editor and most other WYSIWYG editors.


FF 2.0 Inline Spellcheck

Click Image For Larger View

The above screen shot was from Yahoo!Mail. Misspelled words are underlined in red. Right-clicking opens the context menu with a list of suggestions or to add the word to the dictionary. This is going to take some getting use to as I have become so accustomed to the CTRL+Left Click used in SpellBound. Heck I have problems in Thunderbird, I keep CTRL+Left Clicking on those misspelled words.

Again it is important to stress at this time FF 2.0 is still being developed and the Bon Echo Alpha 2 release is more testing and development. I am sure at some point like its predecessor this feature will support/check text entered into an I-Frame.

This was the last of the major new features of FF 2.0, I wanted to evaluate. Although, I may take a look at the RSS handling improvements.

2 Comments on Firefox 2.0 Feature Preview: Inline Spellcheck

  1. I see you documented this bug back in May (inline spell checking not working in certain text boxes)… but where’s the Bugzilla entry for it? If you had created one, instead of just blogging about it, perhaps it’d have been fixed before 2.0 made it out the door.

    For those interested in seeing this bug fixed, please go to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357207 and submit a vote for the bug. I created it after downloading 2.0RC3, seeing the problem, and searching UNSUCCESSFULLY for an existing Bugzilla entry.

  2. Sorry, but back in May it was only Betas and the functionality did not improve until B2 or RC1. Besides I don’t consider this a bug, it was the way they designed this feature (albeit, dumb).

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