Microsoft Edge: Support for Windows Spell Checker in Chromium Engine

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Microsoft wants Chromium users to have the choice of using the native Windows Spellchecker. The company's interest is make this feature available in their own browser, Microsoft Edge, the upcoming version of which is Chromium-based.

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.

The recent commit that they are interested in making 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. It is not available in Edge Canary yet, but has already landed on Google Chrome Canary.

Enable Windows Spellchecker in Google Chrome

  1. Open Google Chrome Canary.
  2. Type chrome://flags in the address bar.
  3. Search for spellchecker.
  4. Enable the flag Use the Windows OS spellchecker.
  5. Relaunch the browser when prompted.

You are done. The direct link to the flag is chrome://flags/#win-use-native-spellchecker.

Other changes Microsoft has already added to the Chromium code base include:

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

As you may already know, Microsoft Edge, the default web browser of Windows 10, is moving to a Chromium-compatible web engine in the Desktop version. Microsoft explains that the intention behind this move is to create better web compatibility for customers and less fragmentation for web developers. Microsoft has already made a number of contributions to the Chromium project, helping to port the project to Windows on ARM. The company promises to contribute more to the Chromium project.

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.

Thanks to Leo!

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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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