The one thing that prevents me from switching to Firefox is the spell checker. Like many non-native English people, I'm constantly switching between languages when typing. Chrome is smart with that, and detects the right language sentence per sentence. Is there a way to have FF do this? Did I miss something?
Having features function by default matters a lot in regards to user adoption. A very large portion of users will never change their default settings, let alone discover and install an add on for something Chrome has by default.
Here’s an article by Mozilla stating the power of default settings:
There's slight difference in that in Firefox's case tech journals will be writing about it, everyone else will be talking about it and it will be on front page of HN. In the case of random extension going rogue it will likely get unnoticed for years and when it is finally noticed there's a small chance it will be picked by HN if planets align.
Maybe. Take a look at my exchange with u/LoSboccacc a parallel branch of this thread. If what he claims is correct (I don't know, but he seems pretty confident) then there is already a huge gaping security hole in FF that no one is talking about (AFAICT).
Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
Yes, the text on that page can be interpreted as supporting your position. Still, "Offer a password manager..." is not quite the same thing as "silently read all of your passwords and do whatever the extension wants with them..." I have a very hard time believing that the latter is the case and that no one has sounded the alarm on this yet.
Also, add-ons have been deprecated in favor of extensions.
Yes, that's true, but it would be correspondingly more difficult to find an alternative. If a plugin is compromised you're much more likely to be able to easily find an alternative. So it's a trade-off either way.
the cost of a compromised plugin is not just the inconvenience, but also all the passwords you might enter on forms if the plugin has full permissions granted
That's a stretch. We're talking about a translation plugin here. If FF doesn't have a mechanism to keep passwords safe from that, then that is the problem, not the lack of native translation.
I am not wise in the ways of Firefox plugins, but if the ability of a plugin to read a password field is not a separate permission, then that is a much more serious problem than the lack of native translation. That's just a huge gaping security hole, full stop. If that is indeed how Firefox is designed, then the lack of native translation should be the least of your concerns.
that's the whole point I'm trying to make! goddamit stop working on assumption and hypothetical thinking I'm a lunatic, this is a real issue and the actual way firefox works, how do you think all password manager work?
We're not talking about password managers here, we're talking about spelling checkers. If a spelling checker can read passwords, then Firefox has a problem that that has nothing to do with spelling checkers or password managers. You cannot safely use any plugin.
Now, it's possible that Firefox does indeed have this very serious problem, I don't know. But I think it's much more likely that the FF engineers did the obvious thing and excluded password fields from being accessed by plugins by default if they can access text fields. If this were not the case, the complaint would not have been, "FF doesn't have native spell checking", the complaint would have been, "FF has this gaping security hole through which you can drive an M1 Abrams tank."
you're not listening and you're having a very strong opinion on a topic you don't know about, which makes having a discussion frustrating, tedious and very unhackernews-like, the data is before your eyes, believe what you will.
but if you are unwilling to listen, then why ask and answer?
What permission is that? The only permission I see is "Access your data for all websites." If that includes passwords, then FF has much bigger problems than not having native spell checking.
One aspect is having to maintain double dictionaries. Back in the early Mac OS X days the system-wide dictionary was one of the little features that made me happy.
as an english only speaker I have no need for a feature like this to be built in. I get much more out of monitor. So perhaps neither should be built in by default?
Weird, Chrome (specifically Electron) always gets confused when I speak English and Spanish all at once and Slack just starts to say everything I spell in English is wrong, it kinda annoys me. I don't think I have experienced this on Firefox.
Whether it is on Chrome, Firefox, Android or in my text editor, I'll always disable spell checking. I am also not a native english speaker and seeing those red underlines everywhere is just way too annoying for me.
Well, I mean, "do" is an English word, "de" is an Esperanto word and "di" is an Indonesian word. I'd rather they get marked as wrong in the wrong language. (If I'm mixing languages, which I do on my phone often enough in text messages, whatever; but then I don't care about spelling anyway.)
All text-based input fields. Like this text-area element I am typing in now. But also for elements with the contentEditable attribute set to true.
This is one of the features I appreciate a lot. I am not a native speaker of the English language, and I sometimes mix British English and USA English, and the spell-checker helps me to write consistently better messages.
I myself (not a native speaker) am very pedantic about setting all my software to enUS and turn all spell checking off. (I can't even stand the linter underline in VS for example, it ruins my focus, especially when it underlines as I type and then lags before disappearing at the end of the word)
The only place where I use spellcheck is e-mail at work to avoid typos.
Over the years I've learned to proofread my messages before sending them and touch typing helps a ton as well.
Similarly, the auto-translate (which Firefox is finally getting) is insanely useful if you ever browse a website that isn’t in a language you can read. I’d be interested in how both features can be implemented in a privacy-preserving way.
