The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

« May 2006 | Main | July 2006 »

June 21, 2006

SpellCheck

I was just now talking to Brett, who's been working on Spell Check for the past few weeks. One of the difficulties Firefox 2.0 faces is that there's no compatibly licensed pan-language dictionary. We're using MySpell now, which is LGPL for English only, I think. From what I'm told, we'd really like to use ASpell, because their dictionaries are way better, but because they are GPL, we can't. IANAL, so I can't give all the reasoning behind any of this.

What this means anyway is that we have an dictionary for English now that marks "Firefox" as a misspelling and our experience for users in other languages is that they have to manually go and download a dictionary. That sucks.

It'd be great if ASpell was also available under a compatible license, or some other compatibly licensed dictionary of similar quality were to emerge.

Posted by ben at 10:04 AM | Comments (31)

©1997-2006 Ben Goodger. All Rights Reserved.
Opinions expressed here are my own, and not those of any organization that I may be affiliated with.
Reload icon is © Stephen Horlander;
Firefox logo is by Jon Hicks, and is a trademark of The Mozilla Foundation.
GetFirefox buttons are from rakaz