1401880 - Fast way to switch dictionary and/or support multiple active and/or all dictionaries to be used at the same time

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement, P4)

Description

[clemens]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0
Build ID: 20170824053622

Steps to reproduce:

- Install two dictionaries.
- Go to a page with an input field.
- Enable spell checking (if not enabled yet).
- Enter a text into the input field which is known to result in a spelling error marker to be shown.
- Open context menu of the input field.
- Select context menu item "Languages".
- Select desired language.



Actual results:

It takes three mouse clicks (including searching on the screen, mousing to the right location, while paying attention to not go anywhere with the mouse where it is causing the the Language sub menu to close again).

This has been considered an inconvenient way to switch dictionaries (for people who need to write in different languages a lot) by other people and someone created this extension to have a GUI element that one can click on to cycle through the installed dictionaries:

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

This extensions has been commented on by 173 users, and has been attempted to be used by at least 14,260 users.

This extensions does not work anymore and/or forces Firefox' "Multiprocess Windows" (at "about:support") to be disabled ("0/1 (Disabled by add-ons)" in my particular case).



Expected results:

Ideally Firefox should offer these three things:

- A setting to use all installed dictionaries for spell checking (like Google Chrome does). (This is tricky on Linux where one has to dive into the operating system and remove some pre-installed dictionaries files which are automatically made available in Firefox.)

- A way to select multiple dictionaries for spell checking.

- A GUI element visible in all browser windows for cycling through the installed dictionaries (like offered by https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dictionary-switcher/).

Comment 1

[clemens]

A workaround can be to use a desktop automation tool (Autokey (Unix), AutoHotkey (Windows)), to automate the context menu of the input field to switch the dictionary upon a hot key press. But unfortunately this is more complex, because the Language (sub) context menu always selects the top entry, so the key presses to be sent need to alternate between...

- Menu key
- "L"
- Return

...and...

- Menu key
- "L"
- Down
- Return

...to toggle between the first two dictionaries.

It also has the drawback that sometimes toggling needs to be done twice.

But for me this is still easier and faster than the mouse based approach.

Comment 2

[Dawid Młynarczyk]

Just to add my two cents and share some user experience... Constant-manual-language-switching is getting so annoying, that I started to consider either turning spell checks off completely in Firefox, or switching to Chrome. I was trying to deal with it, until I was using mainly Polish and English (+ some Spanish or German from time to time). But 3 years ago I met my future wife from Slovakia, and this year we got married. Switching between 3 languages is really tedious work... Plus I'm still learning Slovak, and she is learning Polish, so in communication between us we mix all 3 languages quite frequently if not constantly... ;]

Comment 3

[clemens]

Dawid, thank you for sharing that. I have it easy, I only need to toggle between English and German, so my suggestions above works okay fine for me (since I feel at home with desktop automation on Unix and Windows these days), but I would probably not be happy to apply it to more dictionaries than 2.

With Quantum out of the door, perhaps there will soon be some time to reconsider lesser end user issues like this one. (If this had been pushed back in favor of Quantum, I would have been in favor of that decision - at least in hindsight.)

But I guess with new user influx, this issue may be "more" relevant again, and may have people falling back to Chrome and Co. once again. :(

Comment 4

[clemens]

Toggling the dictionary via desktop automation/key presses has become much less reliable as of late: The spellcheck functionality must be disabled, enabled, and then the desired dictionary be chosen, otherwise it ignores the switch to another dictionary.
This seems a bit unfortunate for professional users who need to write in 2 or more languages in their web applications.

Comment 5

[Stanislav Geyko]

I'll share my experience a bit. It was unbearably annoying, so I had to switch it off entirely. Most of the time I needed only English, but time from time I needed to type in Russian, and when I did so, all Russian words were marked as errors. Besides using only Russian words, I often needed a few words from English or German. So when I set my spell checker for correcting Russian, German and English words were red. I see only one solution: multiple spellcheckers are allowed.