Firefox 2's abismal abysmal spellchecker

Rolf C wrote:   Jan-25-08, 9:34 pm

Some guy made that firefox plugin work with newer versions:

http://www.outraged-artists.com/flockd/profile.php?name=AspellFox

Michael Z wrote:   Jul-21-07, 9:41 am

Sooner or later the Macheads show up:

Mac OS X has system-wide spellcheck, with an excellent Canadian English dictionary to boot. Works great in Safari, and in Camino if you prefer Mozilla's webpage rendering. One of the reasons I won't use MS Word is because it forces you to use Microsoft's crappy excuse for a Canadian spelling dictionary.

Cheers.

Larry L wrote:   Jan-5-07, 4:47 am

There was an extent ion for Firebox 1.x called "aspellfox" which used GNU Aspell, which is demonstrably better than, say, the speller that comes with Word 97:
http://aspell.net/test/

Unfortunately, now that incline spell checking is a standard feature in Fire fox 2, this extension has been discontinued. Gr! I don't know why Firebox doesn't just ship with Aspell, it's free and it rocks.

I landed here in my quest to figure nut how to get Fir fox 2 to use Aspell intend of its own vernaculars speller. The quest continues.

(Spelling errors corrected with Fire fox's suggestions.)

Matt wrote:   Dec-28-06, 10:25 pm

I agree. When Firefox can not suggest the correct word to use, I usually just put it into Google.

Nato Welch wrote:   Dec-10-06, 2:55 pm

sounds like the spellchecker could benefit from the wisdom that was going around about letter ordering last year:

http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp

Although the meme was actually an inaccurate rumor (Cambridge has no such published research), the conclusion is pretty well supported, since the truth of it is instantly verifiable by the reader.

Maybe the spellchecker could incorporate this into its suggestion feature.

Chad wrote:   Nov-2-06, 8:30 am

That is one of the funniest posts I've seen in awhile...

Hanford wrote:   Oct-31-06, 2:11 pm

Firefox gets tons of praises for being great, and I feel it's my duty to not go light on it when it fails.

Notice that although nessicary sounds like necessary, the letter order is completely different.

Spellcheckers often look for letter swaps, in case of typos. I call Firefox's spellchecker abysmal because even the free Linux spellchecker (aspell? pspell?) finds the correct word when checking "nessicary". Firefox's list of suggestions I put in my blog post was the complete list it gave me. None of them even came close.

felix wrote:   Oct-31-06, 1:38 pm

Since it's a great new feature in a free browser it seems harsh to call it abysmal. I think it's a life-saver, especially if you do a lot of text entry into web-forms.

Guessing what someone is trying to spell from their incorrect attempts is a notoriously difficult problem. Notice that although nessicary sounds like necessary, the letter order is completely different. At least you get a red underline so you are aware of the problem.