How to add spellchecking to your web browser

Nowadays lots of the stuff I write ( for example the posts to this blog) is written directly into Safari, my web browser, rather than a word processor. The problem is, Safari doesn’t have automatic spell checking. I discovered a great little bookmarklet called ‘After the Deadline’ which adds spellchecking to any web browser.

(A bookmarklet is a small piece of code that looks like a bookmark but is more than a bookmark!)

Click on this link, and while keeping the mouse button down, drag it to your Safari toolbar (rename it something easy like spellcheck).

You can find the original bookmarklet here.

How to use:
Click the new “spellcheck” link on your toolbar. A little symbol with a tick will appear at each textbox – click it to do a spellcheck.

Posted

February 22, 2010

writing

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5 responses to “How to add spellchecking to your web browser”

Boyto
February 23, 2010
Hm, not sure what I have set up differently, but Safari certainly automatically checks the spelling whenever I type in a website. Using a bookmarklet to spell check just seems like a bit of a hack to me. If it won’t do it automatically, why not just press â‡§âŒ˜; to tell it to check it for you?
Reply
1. admin
  February 23, 2010
  This is not in the URL section of the browser, but in any text boxes in the actual page. For example, the comment box on this blog, just under these posts – it can check all your comments on blogs etc. By the way, how did you get that nice little â‡§âŒ˜; into your comment?
  Reply
Boyto
February 24, 2010
No, just tried it on my other Mac, and when I type in this box it spell checks automatically for me, red underlines and all. I’m running Safari 4.0.3/4.0.4 on Snow Leopard 10.6.2.
The symbols were from the “show character viewer” from the language button I have next to my clock for swapping keyboard layouts. (Not everyone who uses my computer appreciates Dvorak). Otherwise, in Safari at least you can go Editâ†’Special Characters…
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admin
February 26, 2010
Yes you are right Snow Leopard does do spellchecking in the text box automatically in Safari. How long has it been doing this?
Reply
Andrew
March 1, 2010
It’s been happening since Apple changed the way Safari handled text input in 10.5 and Safari 3 – really nifty little feature!
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