When Mozilla launched Firefox 2, they included a built in spell checker, which is kind of awesome if you spend a lot of time entering text in a web-based email, blogging, or word processing application. But for some reason, the Firefox spell checker only looks at large text areas, like the body of your email or blog post. The title fields aren't checked by default. And that's why your blog posts and email subject lines always look so awful. (We'll admit this has bitten us in the behind a few times as well)
But it turns out that
enabling spell check for all text fields is pretty easy.
- Open up the Firefox configuration window by typing about:config in your URL bar
- Type layout.spellcheckDefault in the filter box
- Change the value from 1 to 2
That's it. Now open up any window with a text box and misspell a word. Firefox should underline it in red, and when you right click on the word you should get spelling suggestions.
Tags: firefox, opensource, spell-check, spell-checker, text-box, text-field
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Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsMarkMar 9th 2008 1:38PM
The reason it's off by default is probably because you don't want it checking user names and password fields, which are almost always going to come up misspelled. Unless you're using a really weak password. I guess you could just ignore it though but it would probably drive me crazy.
Big JohnMar 9th 2008 1:38PM
@Mark: It doesn't spell check passwords. At least, it didn't for my password right here to comment!
Thanks for the tip, Brad!
ShawnMar 9th 2008 2:40PM
Cool tip. Thanks.
IGLESIASMar 9th 2008 11:44PM
cool!! got any other tweaks like this in fire fox?
DanMar 10th 2008 8:52AM
You can also just go to:
Tools->Options->Advanced
And under the general tab, under the browsing category, there is a "Check spelling as I type" check box. That's a little easier way.
James M.Mar 10th 2008 9:51AM
Hi Dan,
I'm not certain, but I don't think that will actually do it. That choice will turn spellchecking on, but changing the number in your config file affects *where* the spellchecker looks when it is on.
Anyway, this is a fantastic tip: I'd wondered about this often.