WYSIWYG Improvements in Firefox 2.0
June 24th, 2006
I previously documented the new spell checking feature in Firefox 2.0 which I said I absolutely loved. As part of my review, I said:
If only it’d work with WYSIWYGs such as TinyMCE, it’d be perfect.
Well, it seems like the guys at Mozilla have done exactly that. I’m currently writing this post from a Firefox 2.0 nightly build using TinyMCE with spell checking enabled. It seems to work perfectly.
Further more, in Firefox 2.0, users will get the same context menu on documents with designmode (e.g. WYSIWYG/rich text editors) as they would in a standard textbox. In Firefox 1.5 and older versions, you currently get the same context menu as you get when you right click on a normal page (back/forward/save page/etc.). That means users can now cut, copy and paste using the context menu in Firefox which is a real boon and provides one less reason not to use a rich text editor.
The fact that volunteers from around the world, many unpaid, continue to work on Firefox and produce so many innovations and tools which make browsing a lot easier astounds me. Firefox 2.0 already looks and feels like an amazing product and upgrade. It’s not always the big things such as Places and Phishing Protection which make a product what it is - it’s the small things as well. I think these features and changes are often overlooked.
Thanks to Xeen for letting me know!
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yeah, but it’s a pity that there won’t be the "best" dictionary shipped with 2.0 as the "best" one isn’t compatible because of license issues. I’m not sure which was which as I’ve read that some days ago in Bugzilla. Hopefully there’s a possibility to somehow include this dic on your own and hopefully there’ll be a German dic released as standalone, too.
xeen
Yeah, I think I read that on Ben Goodger’s blog. I do wonder how you can copyright a set of words - it should be possible to create a decent dictionary by copying out the contents of the Oxford English dictionary or something
Alternatively, Firefox could just download the dictionary on install or first run like Flock does with Flash, or how Firefox asks you to install Flash when you first visit a page which needs it.