We show you three different ways to enable or disable the spell checking feature that checks your spelling in web forms in Mozilla Firefox.
Option 1 – Basic Firefox Menu
- Select the “Menu”
button located at the upper-right corner of the screen, then choose “Options“. - Scroll to the “Language” section.
- Select “Check my spelling as I type” if you want to turn spell checker on. Uncheck it if you wish to have it off.
button located at the upper-right corner of the screen, then choose “Options“.Option 2 – From about:config
- Type “about:config” in the address bar.
- In the filter field type “spell“.
- Find the entry for “layout.spellcheckDefault” and double-click it.
- Set the integer to “1” to “enable”the spell checker. Set the integer to “0” to “disable“the spell checker.
Option 3 – Via prefs.js file
- Close Firefox.
- Navigate to the following location based on your operating system.
- Windows XP/Vista/7/8 – “%APPDATA%\Mozilla\“
- Unix/Linux – “~/.mozilla/“
- Mac OS X – “~/Library/Mozilla/” or “~/Library/Application Support/“
- Open the “Profiles” folder.
- Open the folder that represents the profile you would like to edit. The name of the folder will vary. It is usually a bunch of characters, followed by “.default”.
- Open the prefs.js file with a text editor like Notepad.
- Look for a line that contains “layout.spellcheckDefault“. If it doesn’t exist, add a line for it in the file and set it as desired using these examples:
- user_pref(“layout.spellcheckDefault“, 1); = Spell Check enabled
- user_pref(“layout.spellcheckDefault“, 0); = Spell Check disabled
Colin Fry says
Not really! I know and have activated the option to disable the spellchecker. But as with Ilona (26 April) I would like to have a genuine English spellchecker, not a Classic French spellchecker. The language choice seems to be set on English but it still operates in French.
Malcolm Jones says
So far looks good, I want UK English so deselected the US version. Hope it work now.
Ilona says
What I’m after is how to change Firefox’s default dictionary to UK English. I’ve checked under Options in the menu, but the Language option isn’t about the spellcheck dictionary. I know I can add the words to the dictionary manually, one at a time, so the irksome underlining will stop, but it would be nice to know how to change the dictionary.
(I don’t want to remove spellcheck. I find it useful, except where it can’t wrap its little head around UK English!)