Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

The question I've often had is: how do I delete a word I've accidentally added to the dictionary?

Sure, it's easy to add words, but that's like saying it's easy to change preferences. It should just work.

When I write stuff I find Firefox constantly underlining words such as, say, "Firefox," which seems awfully ironic. It also misses PHP, blog, etc. (no really - it actually underlines "etc." as a mistake). I mean, I love the feature, it's really handy and implemented well, but tends to result in more noise than signal a lot of the time, which is a pity really.

It's easy to add words to the dictionary, but it's not that easy to remove them once they're added.

I agree with db. The interface isn't a problem. The default dictionary is simply too incomplete, especially when it comes to internet terms. The following words are all not recognized:

weblog, mySQL, firefox (lowercase), spellcheck, mousepad, CSS.

This is not to say that this is a critical problem, but it would seem to me that a well polished web browser would have an up to date internet dictionary for it's spellcheck.

Adding a few words that the spellchecker misses isn't that bad. Just try once speaking and writing more than one language and always having to switch the dictionary or living with every word underlined. Yeah I know about Dictionary Switcher, but don't we love it all when it changes your dictionary and Firefox hangs up for about 20 seconds simply because it needs to load the (rather big) German dictionary?
@Adding words: mySQL is a relatively unknown company, ask your mom, she doesn't know what mySQL is. She might have heard about Microsoft or Google, but that's it. If you add mySQL you may want to add your one horse town company as well. If it bugs you, just add it to your persdic. I think only really large and well-known companies should be added by default. Same applies for geek abbreviations, although there are tons of phrases that are abbreviated using 'CSS' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_%28disambiguation%29 ) ('Firefox' is spelled this way as it's a custom name, like "Jeff" is.).
There are however some words that are missing in the default dictionary (insert examples here) but I think many of those were added already, just forgot the bugnumber...

One thing I notice is that some webforms capture the right-click to provide their own menu, which prevents the Firefox context menu from appearing.. I haven't found any alternative means of bringing up the spelling suggestions...

What gets me about the spellchecker is that it doesn't work on every field. There doesn't seem to be a way to automatically spellcheck vbulletin fields, for example, which is exactly where I need spellcheck the most.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the dictionary for inline spell check is stored as a file on the local machine, right?

If so, an interesting way to tackle some of the problems outlined by other commenters above might be to add a web-service model where words added by users to their personal dictionaries are pinged to a server somewhere, and if enough people have added that word, it gets added to the "main" dictionary. Then updates to the main dictionary can be pushed out periodically with FF point releases, so you get a constantly improving dictionary.

Some folks might not be comfortable with this, so there'd need to be a way to turn it off; but I'm a pretty rabid privacy advocate and I can't see why this would be bad, esp. if it's not tied to an identifier of who or what machine it came from. The biggest challenge would be figuring out what the right number of adds for a word would be to merge it into the main dictionary; too low and you get lots of junk words, too high and good words get missed. Could probably be determined with some experimentation though.

Just a thought...

Bug 319778 is about migrating from Myspell to Hunspell, wich is a vastly improved fork of Myspell and used in OpenOffice since 2.0.2.
Also see http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/.

Spellchecker is right to flag "firefox" as misspelled. The word is "Firefox".

I think people make too much of the difficulties and too little of their ability to use what they have. Most words that are flagged as misspellings are either (1) misspellings, (2) new words, especially computer words, or (3) unusual proper nouns. Although it would be good to add more words to the dictionary, users can easily add most of the proper nouns and other unusual words that they commonly use. I don't see what the problem is.

I don't see anything wrong with the interface. It's not expecting too much to ask people to right click.

I do note, however, that there doesn't seem to be information about spell checking in the Help menu. I'd say this is a bug. For that matter, the Help menu omits a lot of things. What's wrong with actually updating the Help menu? Is the purpose to make sure that no one reads it?

There is one problem, however. The dictionary is too permissive, and includes a lot of words that could be words, sort of, but are probably just mistakes. For some humorous examples, see bug 358255 ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358255 ).

Jonathan Hickman,
Of course you can spell check text boxes. Right click and you will see.

Inline spell check. I don't want to have to tell it to check the spelling every time I say something on a message board. And that's what you currently have to do in firefox. It's insanely frustrating.

Huh? Firefox *does* have inline spellcheck. That's the default mode.

Or are the boards you frequent using exclusively one-line fields?

As others have said, the problem is not the lack of an easy feature to add words, its the fact that the dictionary seems unready to be in a modern release.

If a browser's own dictionary wont know a simple word as "email" it just becomes a pain to start adding a whole bunch of words.

Words that, by the way... everybody is adding. So I read Jason Lefkowitz's suggestion of the ability of words to be recollected from us the users... and I love the idea. I hope someone picks up that idea. Great idea! :-)

"Or are the boards you frequent using exclusively one-line fields?"

Vbulletin. It doesn't seem to work in vbulletin. What do I know? It might be a vbulletin problem. All I know as an end-user is that I'm continually frustrated by fx's built-in spellchecker.

"(no really - it actually underlines "etc." as a mistake)"

Even more boggling, it underlines "etc" as a mistake and suggests "etc." as a correction... o.O

Another issue compounding this is that the current spell checker is based off a buggy, obsoleted, and unsupported library: myspell. Fedora for example is looking to completely rid itself of aspell in favour of hunspell which gives much better results in general. There is a corresponding bug in bmo as well. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319778

"The question I've often had is: how do I delete a word I've accidentally added to the dictionary?"

That question even made it to the front page of Digg:
http://digg.com/programming/Remove_misspelled_words_from_your_Firefox_dictionary

I often add words by mistake, and think a confirm box would be handy for this feature.

jonathan: can you reference which vbulletin sites that you are seeing this on? I just tried on and I did not see any problem. thanks.

Really?

http://funhouserock.com/funhouse/blab/forumdisplay.php?f=5

It doesn't make sense to ask the regular user to go to %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
and alter a file just to get rid of a word.
In my opinion, a dictionary context should have some sort of "manage dictionary" UI option.

The vbulletin spellchecking problem is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357207 , I think.

Jonathan Hickman,
You usually tell it to spell check the field and it remembers. That's the way I think it's supposed to work, and it does on mine. But some text boxes, like the URL window, it doesn't seem to spell check at all.

The "Add to dictionary" command in the right-click menu is very handy. The problem is that this command seems to appear only if some suggestions for the word are found in the current dictionary. If there are no suggestions, then this command does not appear, which is somewhat absurd.

s427: Can you cite an example of a word you came across that did not have a suggestion? I tried a bunch of crazy combinations and in each case the dictionary came up with some sort of suggestion, so I wasn't able to trigger a scenario where suggest didn't come up. Your case sounds like a bug, and would like to get it on file if I can get steps to reproduce. Thanks.

Marcia: Well that's weird, because I'm absolutely sure I have encountered this bug several times before, but now that I try it again, I can't seem to reproduce it. So I guess you can just ignore my previous comment for the time being... (BTW, if you want a "no suggestion" scenario, you can try some absurd word like "buuuuuuuuuu".)

Well I got this bug again and it seems to depend on whether you use the actual right-click button (on your mouse) to make suggestions appear, or whether you use the special key that's found on many keyboards (the key which emulates the right-click, on my keyboard it's located between the right Ctrl and Win keys). I use this key very often and in some cases, the resulting contextual menu is different from what I get if I use my mouse to right-click. I made some screenshots comparing the two scenarii : http://www.s427.ch/utils/firefox-spellcheck-bug.png

While adding words to the persdict.dat file works, Firefox doesn't seem to consult this when making up the list of suggestions. So, if you added pentasaccharide to a persdict.dat, and typed pentasacccharide, the suggestion list includes saccharides, saccharine, but not what one added to the persdict.dat. Is this a bug, or a feature?? Adding words ensures that "odd" words are no longer flagged when spelled correctly, but having them appear as suggestions would be half the utility of creating and updating a persdict.dat file.