Enable Windows Spellchecker in Microsoft Edge Chromium

Spell Check Mark Icon

How to Enable Windows Spellchecker in Microsoft Edge Chromium

As you may recall, Microsoft has made efforts to add the ability to use the built-in spell checker in Windows in Chromium-based browsers. First introduced in Chrome Canary, this new feature has finally reached Microsoft Edge Chromium. Here's how to enable it.

The Microsoft team is actively participating in the development of the Chromium project, adapting it to their own vision of the browser. The developers behind the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge commit their changes to the parent project, which is used in browsers like  Google Chrome, Opera, Yandex Browser, and Vivaldi.

Microsoft team has made the native Windows Spellchecker available in Windows 10 and Windows 8 available in the Chromium-based browsers in addition to the default Hunspell spellchecker. The Hunspell spellchecker is an open-source project that powers many other products mostly popular on Linux, such as LibreOffice, Geany, Pidgin, and many others.

The change is currently implemented as an experimental flag.

To Enable Windows Spellchecker in Microsoft Edge Chromium,

  1. Update Edge Chromium to the latest available version (see the list below).
  2. Type edge://flags/#win-use-native-spellchecker into the address bar of Edge.
  3. Enable the flag Use the Windows OS spellchecker.
  4. Relaunch the browser when prompted.

You are done!

The change is described as follows:

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.

The ability to use the native spell checker of Windows is still an experimental feature, so it may have usability and stability issues. That's why it is 'hidden' behind a flag.

Microsoft is currently using three channels to deliver updates to Edge Insiders. The Canary channel receives updates daily (except Saturday and Sunday), the Dev channel is getting updates weekly, and the Beta channel is updated every 6 weeks. The new Microsoft Edge browser installs updates automatically. Also, you can manually check for updates by visiting the menu Help > About Microsoft Edge. Finally, you can grab the Edge installer from the following page:

Download Microsoft Edge Preview

At the moment of this writing, the latest Microsoft Edge Chromium versions are as follows.



I have covered many Edge tricks and features in the following post:

Hands-on with the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge

Also, see the following updates.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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