Firefox spelling
Dec. 7th, 2006 02:45 amI've had Firefox's immediate spelling checker on for a week, and been wondering why that seems handy whereas Word's aggravates me. I think it may be:
* It's a really little thing, but in Firefox errors are marked with a thin dotted red line, that somehow seem to say "Hey, you might want to take a look at this." Whereas Word's are a gigantic red wavy line that somehow seem to say "Hey! Notice me! Fix me before typing the rest of the sentence or trying to read over the grammar of what you've typed!" The first fits me a lot better.
(It's like grammar checkers. If the user interface was crafted to say "Whoop! 75% chance of error, just check it over," it'd work a lot better than looking like "ERROR!" which just raises everyone's blood pressure every time they're not perfect. It's part of my philosophy to say what you mean. If you have a program which spots errors with a 75% rate, and it says so, great, if it pretends 100% I hate it.)
* I'm pre-biased against Office programs and towards Firefox.
* When typing in Word I always assume I'll check it for spelling later before I show anyone (which I can then fail to do) but it feels as if spending much effort on it now when I might likely rewrite is a pain. But in a web browser I'm always going to commit it almost immediately, so time spent checking is always worth it.
* I have habits inoculated from when I first used a Wordprocessor, when I didn't want to fiddle with the dictionary in case I tainted it much, and so often left out one-use words and things. Since I installed a dictionary in 3.5 seconds here, I don't care.
Hmmm. I do quite a bit of typing here. Maybe it will actually help me get it right? :) All that's missing is some regexps being added to the dictionary, eg. "Hmmmm of any length" or "[word]'s" or "[word]s" (OK, not always right, but more often than not).
* It's a really little thing, but in Firefox errors are marked with a thin dotted red line, that somehow seem to say "Hey, you might want to take a look at this." Whereas Word's are a gigantic red wavy line that somehow seem to say "Hey! Notice me! Fix me before typing the rest of the sentence or trying to read over the grammar of what you've typed!" The first fits me a lot better.
(It's like grammar checkers. If the user interface was crafted to say "Whoop! 75% chance of error, just check it over," it'd work a lot better than looking like "ERROR!" which just raises everyone's blood pressure every time they're not perfect. It's part of my philosophy to say what you mean. If you have a program which spots errors with a 75% rate, and it says so, great, if it pretends 100% I hate it.)
* I'm pre-biased against Office programs and towards Firefox.
* When typing in Word I always assume I'll check it for spelling later before I show anyone (which I can then fail to do) but it feels as if spending much effort on it now when I might likely rewrite is a pain. But in a web browser I'm always going to commit it almost immediately, so time spent checking is always worth it.
* I have habits inoculated from when I first used a Wordprocessor, when I didn't want to fiddle with the dictionary in case I tainted it much, and so often left out one-use words and things. Since I installed a dictionary in 3.5 seconds here, I don't care.
Hmmm. I do quite a bit of typing here. Maybe it will actually help me get it right? :) All that's missing is some regexps being added to the dictionary, eg. "Hmmmm of any length" or "[word]'s" or "[word]s" (OK, not always right, but more often than not).