Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Spellcheck bug in Firefox 3.0

A user of the Australian English dictionary files contacted me to let me know the words "Colorful" and "aluminum" were not picked up correctly by the spelling checker. This was quite strange since the words are not in the dictionary.

On further investigation of Firefox 3.0, I found if you open Firefox 3.0 and then paste "Colorful aluminum" into a form, these words will not be correctly identified as being wrong.

To get around this glitch turn Check Spelling off and then on again using the context menu. Once the spellcheck is working, the spellcheck continues to work.

There is no need to report this as a problem to me (the creator and maintainer of the Australian English dictionary files) as the problem is not in the dictionary, but is with Firefox 3.0. Please report the problem to the Firefox project.

Thank you Andrew for bringing this to my attention.

Happy spellchecking - Kelvin Eldridge

3 comments:

  1. Whilst not related to the dictionary files, I found when clicking on a link from an email in Outlook, Firefox 3.0 prompts to save the page (from the temporary area) instead of opening the page using the browser.

    Switching to Internet Explorer 7 showed clicking on a link in an email worked as it should.

    The other approach which worked was to copy and paste the link into the browser.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A little more information on the Outlook/Firefox email issue.

    I found the issue was with the following links provided by Epson support in an email.

    http://support2.epson.net/manuals/english/page/aculaserc900/ref_g/SETUP_1.HTM

    and

    http://support2.epson.net/manuals/english/page/aculaserc900/ref_g/index.htm

    Other links I have tested do work as expected.

    I don't know what it is about these links which causes the issue. It may also happen with other links.

    ReplyDelete
  3. We recently found the Custom Dictionary facility in Firefox 3 under Windows Vista does not add words reliably.

    If you are collecting words for the dictionary work (http://www.dictionary.JustLocal.com.au) copy and paste the words into a separate text file.

    Thanks in advance.

    Kelvin Eldridge

    ReplyDelete