How to eliminate speling mistkes in Firefox text boxes

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Open Source

How to eliminate speling mistkes in Firefox text boxes

by Brad Linder Mar 9th 2008

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, spell-check, spell-checker, text-box, text-field

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Mark said 1:38PM on 3-09-2008

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 John said 1:38PM on 3-09-2008

@Mark: It doesn't spell check passwords. At least, it didn't for my password right here to comment!

Thanks for the tip, Brad!

Shawn said 2:40PM on 3-09-2008

Cool tip. Thanks.

IGLESIAS said 11:44PM on 3-09-2008

cool!! got any other tweaks like this in fire fox?

Dan said 8:52AM on 3-10-2008

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. said 9:51AM on 3-10-2008

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.

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