Blog van Jeroen van der Gun

Being a Dutchman, you'll often visit websites in Dutch. But English websites will go through your browser as well. Occasionally you will submit text to such websites.

Because you want your texts to be read and understood, you try to use a spell checker. Of course, the spell checker has to use the dictionary of the correct language. This is where the problem comes in.

Assuming that you are not the kind of Dutchman that thinks that a monopoly for Internet Explorer is a good thing because webmasters would only need to make their site work in one browser, and you're not using Safari, then you're using Firefox. Firefox has spell checking functionality built in, supports multiple dictionaries, but it does not switch them automatically!

So if you're browsing to an English site, you'll manually have to activate the English dictionary, and if you visit a Dutch site afterwards, you'll have to switch the setting back manually as well. This is pretty stupid, since HTML provides a clear mechanism to set the language of elements, including text fields in need of spell checking. It is even more stupid since Firefox has this very mechanism implemented: right-click on a text box, click Properties, look at the language and notice that the spell checker does not automatically use the corresponding dictionary.

In the meantime, two add-ons are available as solutions to automatically switch dictionaries. The first is Dictionary Switcher. At first sight it works like a charm, but after using it in real life. When you start typing something in one page, you view another Firefox tab or window, and you continue typing, then the language has suddenly been changed. So in reality it even makes things worse.

The other add-on is Quick Locale Switcher. While this one was originally intended to switch the UI language of the browser, it can also be configured to switch the dictionary for spell checking. This one works better but has problems as well. It sets the dictionary based on the language of the page instead of the language of the text box, which is problematic if multiple languages are used on the same page (like this blog). As a workaround, I had to set the language of the html element to the desired spell checking language and the head and body elements to their real language. There's also a glitch that adds new languages to the menu that have not been enabled: for some reason French and Japanese ended up in my language selection menu.

In the end, however, this really is a bug on Mozilla's side. I hope that they will address this issue in future Firefox versions. (The very reason I'm writing this blog post in English is that I hope it will eventually be read by Mozilla folks.)

Off-topic notice to regular readers: don't worry, the next blog post will be in Dutch again.