Up until tonight, whenever I posted a new story on HTMLfixIT, I did so by typing it into my text editor and spell checking it there before pasting the lot into the submission form for articles.
Tonight I came across Spellbound which is a full spell checking extension for Firefox.
It installed flawlessly, I simply selected all the components by ticking the relevant boxes on the spellbound page, and then did the same for a dictionary (choosing Australian in my case.).
Once Firefox restarted, it was all in place and functional. I now can enter text directly into the form textarea, and then just right click somewhere and select “Check Spelling”, which results in a fairly typical spell check box popping up with all the text you entered in there ready to be checked. (or fixed in my case. )
In fact, this article itself was spell checked by this method, and it’s made my day just that little bit more productive.
I should add that this extension only works with versions of Firefox 0.9 or above, so if your using an earlier version, go and update it.
In other news, the recent shell: flaw found in Mozilla, was fixed within 1 day of being revealed. Not bad when you consider that a similar problem in IE is much older and has not yet been properly fixed.
Speaking of security problems, Microsoft has just released a heap of new patches for Windows (7), some (4) of which are considered “critical”, so if your a Windows user and haven’t run “Windows Update” recently, now would be a good time.
Unfortunately that’s not going to help you much if you’re still an Internet Explorer user, as Secunia a security firm, have just revealed four new show stopper security flaws they have found in Internet Explorer 6, which they have classed as “Extremely critical”.
Mozilla and Opera are having a field day with all the recent IE security flaws, for the first time in ages, a significant shift has started away from Internet Explorer. Although HTMLfixIT’s and w3schools browser statistics seem to show that IE has been declining and Mozilla/Opera growing slowly for some time now. The change has just become more pronounced of late. I suspect that the difference in the statistics compared to those claiming that IE still accounts for 94% may have something to do with the substance of the sites in question. Tech related are by their very nature more likely to be visited by more experienced users, and those are the users most likely to have wilfully changed browsers. Grandma is not likely to be able to tell you what browser she is using, let alone change to another one.
One final little news snippet is also about Firefox, apparently the final 1.0 release when it will go from public beta to official product is scheduled for September 14th. All the show stopper bugs have long since been weeded out and the smaller ones that the several million users have found are being worked out in time for the September release.
As someone that has already been using Firefox since it first came out as a trial release, I can happily say that the only bugs I have found have been small and relatively unimportant, and in 0.9+ releases I have not found any bugs at all. So if 1.0 is as good or better then the 0.9.2 I am using now, it’s going to be a fantastic breakthrough product.
regards
Franki
