How to activate “Check my spelling as I type” in FireFox 3
One of the most annoying things about upgrading to a new computer is having to reinstall everything. Complaining about having to migrate files, which is rather effortless thanks to media sharing servers, external hard drives, and the like, really pales in comparison.
I updated to FireFox 3 on my old computer without any issues. When I got my laptop recently and downloaded FireFox 3, everything worked fine and dandy except for one thing: spell check. That’s a feature I learned I am nothing without, and had to cope with for the past month or so until today. I had to learn how to do this on my own because I couldn’t find any helpful websites, so I thought I’d post my findings on here and help anyone who catches this page via a search engine (most of you will).
Programming and I have never really gone out on a date, but if I were a romantic type, I’d say the reason for this lies with the differences between how I attained the browser threequel. My hypothesis is that since FireFox 2 never required what FireFox 3 requires to get spell check up and running, when I updated to it on my old computer it simply somehow realized my spell check was operational. And since I just downloaded F3 to my new laptop cold, it didn’t have anything to base it on(?).
I say this because I don’t remember having to do on F2 what I’m about to explain to you that you have do on F3. Without asking me, old F2 simply chose English (American), like it was before, when I updated. If that makes any sense.
The chase: scroll down until you see the comments section. It should be right below this entry. If it’s not, and all you see is other blog posts, click the title of this entry. (If it still doesn’t show up, email me.)
Type a sentence or so of text. You might have to type quite a few lines in order for it to register. Highlight only the text you just wrote and right-click “Add Dictionaries…”. Not that it would let you highlight anything outside the text box anyway, but highlighting text you didn’t type in yourself — like this very sentence — and right-clicking won’t give you that option.
Click “Add Dictionaries…”. It will most likely lead you to this page. From there, find the language you want FireFox to spell check (as in: “English (US)” will find ‘favour’ to be misspelled but “English (Canadian)” will not), and click “Install Dictionary”.
That will lead you to another page where you’ll simply have to click the green “Add to FireFox” button, click “Install”, let it install, restart FireFox by clicking the aptly-named “Restart Firefox” button, and, ta-dun, you’ve got your spellcheck working!
Note: make sure you actually have “Check my spelling as I type” enabled. You can do that by clicking Tools, Options, Advanced, and then the little box beside “Check my spelling as I type”. If you have any other issues with dictionaries, click Tools, Add-ons and under Extensions make sure your dictionary is enabled.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Thanks so much - Google gave this as a search result. I never needed to do that with Firefox 2, and upgrading to Firefox 3 made the spell check mysteriously disappear. Thanks again!