Firefox 2 now has inline spell checking capabilities! This is one feature that I have been waiting for a long time to see. The screenshot above shows it in action and shows what nice features it has. It will spell check as you type and will underline the misspelled words with a red dotted line.
First the updated Add-ons Manager and now a spell check feature. Mozilla must really be trying to get a lot of important features implemented for the Firefox 2.0 Alpha 2 that is scheduled for May 9. This is really starting to get exciting now.
NOTE: The download file below is for a nightly build of Firefox. Nightly builds are known to be very unstable and you should only download it after backing up your current profile.
Download The Firefox Nightly That Has The Spell Check Functionality
I just wanted to chime in and say that I totally agree with you. An inline spell checker was all that Firefox 2 was missing, but now things are all squared away. Gotta love it!
Yeah, this is really awesome for those people that do postings on web sites or forums. Before I was using the Google Toolbar to do my spell checking.
-Ryan
The fact that this is already in Google is a worry – sure, FF has it now without the update, but what new features can we expect? I’m not sure what Places was, but it sounded good and has now vanished. Whilst M$ are just copying FF at the moment, they may eventually end up with most of the same features, and people will stop switching over. FF needs something new that really changes the way people use the net.
Places in Firefox really looked promising and it is unfortunate that they had to pull it. It was a whole redesign of the bookmarking system that allowed people to keep all of their bookmarks, feeds, and more in one simple location.
I do think that Mozilla will be pushing to make sure that more features are implemented before the release of Firefox 2 just so that they can still distinguish themselves from Microsoft. I agree that Firefox needs to have something that will make people switch over but I think that is where extensions come into play. Two reasons that I always see people switching to Firefox is for the security and for the extensions.
There is also supposed to be a new user interface with Firefox 2 which should be very cool to see!
-Ryan