Microsoft Enables Windows Spellcheck API for All Chromium Browsers

Microsoft Edge is moving away from the traditional spell checking mechanism in Chromium. Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge browser will now make use of the Windows Spellcheck API, allowing for an improved spellcheck experience.

The new feature is obviously limited to Windows users, and Microsoft says it will only be available to users on Windows 8.1 and above. The new feature is enabled with Microsoft Edge 83, and replaces Chromium’s Hunspell spellchecker with Windows’ own built-in Spellcheck API.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

[ad unit=’in_content_premium_block’]

But here’s the cool part: Microsoft built this new feature working with Google engineers on the Chromium project, which means all Chromium-based browsers will now be able to benefit from the Windows Spellcheck API as well.

There are a couple of improvements that you will see with this change. For one, Microsoft’s Windows Spellcheck API has better support for URLs, acronyms, and email addresses. But more importantly, using the Windows Spellcheck API will enable support for more languages and dialects, as well as a shared custom dictionary.

The following screenshot is a pretty great comparison:

As for Microsoft Edge 83, it will use your preferred Windows language for spellchecking, though you can set preferred languages and other settings by heading over to edge://settings/languages. For languages that are not supported by the Windows Spellcheck API, Microsoft Edge will fall back to Hunspell.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation 3 comments

  • truerock2

    28 May, 2020 - 1:23 pm

    <p>For as long as Google has been around, I have used Google search as my fall-back spell-checker.</p><p>When Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, etc cannot figure out my mangled spelling I use Google to find the correct spelling.</p><p><br></p><p>When I was in college majoring in computer science, I had an assignment to write a spellchecker in SNOBAL.</p><p><br></p><p>I think the issue is that Microsoft uses a dictionary of correctly spelled words. I think Google also uses a dictionary of correctly spelled words – but, also uses a dictionary of misspelled words and what the possible correct word spellings might be.</p><p><br></p><p>Just now, this forum could not figure out how to correctly spell "mis-spelled". I I had to use Google to find the correct spelling.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

  • dftf

    28 May, 2020 - 4:39 pm

    <p>Mehedi: "<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">and Microsoft says it will only be available to users on Windows 8.1 and above".</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Well, I'm still puzzled why Microsoft ever decided to release Microsoft Edge for Windows 7, anyway, given the stable release came out literally the day-after Windows 7 went EOL.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Sure, enterprises can use ESU to keep Win7 Pro and Enterprise PCs receiving updates until Jan 2023… but Microsoft have said they will end-support for Edge on Windows 7 at the same-time Google Chrome does — currently earmarked for July 15, 2021. So even ESU customers won't continue to receive updates for Edge on Windows 7 past that point and will likely have to rely on Firefox, where I imagine their ESR version will-likely last until the Jan 2023 cut-off…</span></p>

  • kralizek

    29 May, 2020 - 1:00 pm

    <p>It would be cool if they supported multiple languages within the same context.</p><p><br></p><p>For an Italian living in Sweden and working mostly in English, it happens quite often to mix languages.</p>

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC