Last month we reported that Microsoft is planning to integrate Windows spellchecker with Chromium browsers. By the look of things, Microsoft has finally started that process to enable the feature in with Google Chrome. A recent commit confirmed the news.
Add feature flag for Windows native spellchecker
The Windows native spellchecker is in the process of being integrated to
Chromium. To facilitate manual testing, this CL adds a chrome://flags entry
to easily enable / disable the use of the native spellchecker on Windows.
This feature once integrated, will be available for all the Chromium-based browsers including Google Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge. As a quick reminder, Microsoft is still testing the new spellchecker feature. It means that you may need to wait for a few more weeks to be able to use it in Google Chrome. Meanwhile, you can play around with the experimental flag in Chrome Canary.
Steps to enable Windows Spellchecker in Chrome
You should be running the latest version of Chrome Canary to enable the spellchecker feature in the browser.
- Go to the Start menu and launch Chrome Canary.
- Navigate to the address bar and go to Chrome://flags.
- Now use the search bar to look for the Use the Windows OS spellchecker flag.
- You can enable the Windows spellchecker feature by changing the default value of the flag to enabled.
- Finally, relaunch your browser to save the changes.
The feature is still in an experimental phase so the new Windows spellchecker may not work as expected. However, at the time of writing this article, the flag is missing in the latest Edge Canary builds.
What do you think about this new spellchecker feature? Do you think that it would be useful? Share your opinions and ideas in the comments section below.
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