How in the Tech

Spell Check all Fields in Firefox

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 23, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

The flexibility of the Firefox browser is one of its main assets in the browser supremacy war. In addition to the multitude of extensions available many features can be further customized through Firefox’s advanced config, generally hidden and unknown by most of its users. The current release of Firefox has an inline spell check feature, not unlike what you are familiar with in Microsoft Word. As more and more companies shift their product focus to web enabled online services; such as to-do lists, calendars, and email, coupled with the atrocious spelling of this generation, it’s not hard to see the value of such a feature. However, by default, Firefox will only spell check in large text boxes, not every form field that takes your input.

On the surface, the rationale behind this does make some sense. Single line text fields are commonly used for username input – which generally would appear as a misspelled word for most. Should this not bother you, you may be interested to know that this is a solvable issue, all within the comfort of a vanilla Firefox install. Through the magic of about:config, here is is how it works.

1. In a new Firefox window/tab, type about:config in the address bar.



2. From the Filter box, type layout.spellcheckdefault.



3. Double click on the result and change the value from 1 to 2.



4. Lastly, verify the inline spell checking is enabled. From the Firefox men, Tools->Options->Advanced. Check off Check my spelling as I type.

That’s all there is to it. Restart Firefox in order to apply the change.