Firefox: spell check any field

by Josh Highland on July 17, 2007

firefoxlogo Firefox: spell check any field

I can’t spell. That no joke. If you have read my blog for any length of time, you will know this. One of my saving graces has been the built in spell checker in Firefox (I’ve already used it 5 times in this post!)

By default Firefox will only spell check large text areas. This is great for the bodies of forum and blog posts, but it doesn’t help when I am filling out a single line text box, like the subject of this blog, or a forum topic title.

There is a solution to this, so you can have Firefox’s spell check available to all fields in a browser:

In Firefox, do the following (ignore all quotes)

  1. type this in the browser address bar “about:config”
  2. look for “layout.spellcheckDefault”
  3. change the value to “2″
  4. restart firefox
  • digg Firefox: spell check any field
  • facebook Firefox: spell check any field
  • stumbleupon Firefox: spell check any field
  • twitter Firefox: spell check any field
  • delicious Firefox: spell check any field
  • reddit Firefox: spell check any field
  • friendfeed Firefox: spell check any field
  • posterous Firefox: spell check any field
  • tumblr Firefox: spell check any field

{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }

1 simon August 8, 2007 at 12:43 pm

Thank you, vary helpful.

2 Daniel October 17, 2007 at 3:55 pm

You rock!

3 CJ December 19, 2007 at 8:45 am

Excellent! Thanks for posting this.

BTW, anyone who might not realize how to “do” this, when you find layout.spellcheckDefault right-click and choose “modify”, enter 2 in the field box, hit “okay” and you’re set to restart Firefox.

4 Chris February 16, 2008 at 12:45 pm

Thanks for the great tip. Now I can spell check at every place in the browser.

5 Matt July 19, 2008 at 6:27 am

Indeed…very helpful.

Thanks,

-Matt

6 Promotional Guy January 27, 2009 at 3:23 pm

Great post! It was very useful to me. This spell check in browser has been bugging me for a while, all I had to do was Google it, and viola you had the solution. Thank you!!!

7 jxf011 March 13, 2010 at 5:59 am

Outstanding, thanks!! My Firefox 3.6 wasn’t spell checking Facebook’s News Feed entries until I did your trick, thanks!

8 mane June 2, 2010 at 1:08 pm

Great! Very useful! It should be a setting available in Firefox options directly! Thank you!

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