I’ve really come to appreciate and rely on the SpellBound Firefox extension. Whether it’s creating a new blog entry, submitting bug reports and comments, or any other web-based content, having spell check only a right-click away is very handy.
Things were going swimmingly, until Firefox 1.5.0.1 update came out. Unfortunately the SpellBound extension and the corresponding dictionaries both reported incompatibility with the newer version. A quick web search revealed one possible solution: editing the install.rdf file inside the XPI packages to raise the “maximum” version number supported.
After uninstalling my existing extensions, then installing these newly-modified ones, spell check was back again! Here are copies of my modified XPI files that could be installed directly into Firefox 1.5.0.1 for Windows without any editing:
- SpellBound extension (
spellbound_0.7.3_1501.xpi) - Spellcheck library, English (
spellbound_lib_win32_1.0+_20050727_1501.xpi)
Update: In the comments, some people suggested using Google toolbar’s spellchecker. Nathan Sharp cautioned that this would send your data to remote Google servers which may be a concern. I followed up in an entry about Google Toolbar.
Update #2: Based on the number of comments and visitors, this post has become fairly popular. I’m glad people found it helpful. I also just updated my server so that these .xpi files are served with the correct MIME type so you should be able to install directly into Firefox by clicking the links above (and allowing www.cantoni.org as a trusted install site).