Things We Love: Spell Check in Firefox 2

Firefox 2 has a built in spell checker that works in any multiline field you edit. Although this feature has been around for a while, it's worth repeating for those of us who haven't tried the free browser since version 2 was released.

This feature is extremely useful when submitting comments online and you don't want to copy and paste from Firefox into Microsoft Word to do a quick spell check. This is also great if you create content online (think web based e-mail, wikis or blogs).

Below is a quick example of this in Gmail:


(Creating an e-mail)


(Right clicking the misspelled word to correct it)

Some words that aren't in Firefox's dictionary (LLC is a good example) will be underlined. Left alone this can be a bit annoying. To fix it, right click the correctly spelled word and select "Add to dictionary":



Adventurous readers can find the words you've added to Firefox's dictionary by opening Windows Explorer and typing in the path below:

%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

Once you press enter, you will be redirected to the profiles folder of Firefox.

Browse to your profile folder (it will look like "NameOfProfile.default") and you should see a file named persdict.dat.

This can be backed up if you've added a lot of words to your dictionary, or even manually edited with a text editor such as Notepad++. Be careful to not use the built in text editor in Windows (Notepad) to view the file, as the program did not display the file correctly on our computers.

All images in this post were created by Solid Capture Screen Capture.

Using Adblock Plus in Firefox

One of our favorite add-ons for the Firefox web browser is Adblock Plus.

This utility allows you to get rid of ads and banners on websites. Besides allowing you to subscribe to filter lists for commonly encountered ads, it also allows you to quickly block specific images and banners on a page. This prevents the ads from being downloaded and displayed again.

How to install Adblock Plus on Mozilla Firefox:

In Firefox, navigate to the link below:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

Click the button marked Install Now and follow the onscreen prompts.

Once the add-on is installed you'll be prompted to restart Firefox. When you do, you'll see a window appear that allows you to subscribe to a list of filters:


(click image for full size version)

Select one of the subscriptions from your local area and click Subscribe.

At this point you'll largely be done. Adblock Plus will work in the background, blocking ads from the filter list that you subscribed to.

Blocking specific images:

If you find a particular image or banner that you want to block, just right click it and select "Adblock Image...". The image will disappear, and your computer won't attempt to download it in the future.

For example, you could use this to disable the image at our website that displays some of the companies that use Solid Converter PDF to Word.

What if you want to display the image again? Go into Tools | Add-Ons | Adblock Plus | Options | Right click the particular link you want (it should be at or near the top) and select Delete. Click OK to close the window and then refresh your browser to see the image again.