Firefox 2’s abismal abysmal spellchecker
I am a bad speller. And it’s frustrating to think that spell checkers have been around for 20 years but spellchecking is still not an OS-wide function. Instead, every app that spellchecks has it’s own UI and it’s own dictionary. This should all be built into the OS. Just like I can right-click any text field and select “copy” or “paste” there should be a “spell Check” option. It’s like the days where every app had it’s own set of printer drivers you needed to install.
I’ve been using Firefox 2’s spell checker, and while I’m happy they implemented it (especially with the red underlining) it seems pretty bad. One of my problem words that is difficult for me to spell even when concentrating is necessary. I always spell it nessicary. Let’s take a look at the complete list of Firefox’s suggestions for nessicary:
- carsickness
- lyricalness
- vicariousness
- carsickness’s
- caressingly
What. The. Fuck. Carsickness’s? Are you kidding me?
Of course, I am still blaming Microsoft for this, since spell-checking should be an OS-level function.
I'm Hanford Lemoore. My parking skills are unparalleled.
October 31st, 2006 at 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.
October 31st, 2006 at 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.
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.
November 2nd, 2006 at 8:30 am
That is one of the funniest posts I’ve seen in awhile…
December 10th, 2006 at 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.
December 28th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
I agree. When Firefox can not suggest the correct word to use, I usually just put it into Google.
January 5th, 2007 at 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.)
July 21st, 2007 at 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.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Some guy made that firefox plugin work with newer versions:
http://www.outraged-artists.com/flockd/profile.php?name=AspellFox