How to enable spell checking for all text fields in Firefox

Posted on April 19, 2008 at 5:19 am

Don’t you just love the built-in spell checker in Firefox? It’s probably one of the main reasons why I use Firefox on top of the 20+ other reasons! It’s great for me because I spend a lot of time on the Internet: surfing web sites, writing blog posts, writing comments, emailing friends and family, using online to-do lists, etc. A lot of it actually involves typing or entering text!

However, one thing you may have noticed is that Firefox only checks the spelling on large text fields, not all of them. It will check the spelling for text fields like the body of an email or in a comment box. If you want Firefox to check the spelling in all text fields, you just have to tweak one of the settings.

The reason that Firefox defaults to not checking the spelling of all fields is because the smaller fields are usually things like your username or user ID, which would more often than not come out misspelled. However, if you use a particular web site a lot and want it to spell check every last text field, here’s how to do it.

How to enable spelling checking on all fields in Firefox

1. Open Firefox and type in about:config to open up the Firefox configuration window.

2. In the Filter box, go ahead and type in layout.spellcheckdefault

3. Double click on the preference and change the value from 1 to 2.

And that’s it! Now just go ahead and restart Firefox for the changes to take affect. You can test it out by going to any site with a text box, like a search box, and misspelling a word. You should see it underlined in red and the normal suggestions when you right-click on the word.

You can turn on or turn off spell checking altogether in Firefox by going to Tools, then Options and then Advanced.