782879 - Setting to change spell-check language is not very discoverable

Status: NEW

(Core :: Spelling checker, enhancement)

Description

[Thomi Richards]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0
Build ID: 20120814131422

Steps to reproduce:

I use Firefox as packaged in Ubuntu. That means that the default spellcheck language is US English. However, I live in New Zealand, so I really want the EN-GB or EN-NZ dictionary to be installed. 

I installed the Addons for the New Zealand dictionary and installed it, thinking (incorrectly) that it would change my spellcheck language to EN-NZ


Actual results:

Nothing - the addon is listed, but the spellcheck dictionary in use never changes. At first I thought that there might be  a "Preferences" link on the dictionary addon, but there isn't.

Eventually I found that I need to right-click on a textbox on a website, and select Languages->English (New Zealand).

This is not very discoverable for a couple of reasons:

1) I need to right-click on a textbox, but I might not have a web page open with a text box. How am I supposed to know to do that? I've just installed the dictionary I want via the Addons UI - I think it's a reasonable expectation that either the dictionary I just installed become the default, or at least that I can make it the default via the same UI.

2) Right click menus are usually reserved for context-sensitive actions. However, changing the spellcheck language affects more than just the current tab - it seems to affect the current tab and all new tabs opened. Note that in the right-click menu, the language selection is the only entry that can effect more than the current tab. This also can produce some interesting situations where a user has several tabs open, without a consistent spellcheck language set across all of them.


Expected results:

I can think of a couple of alternative options:

 * When installing a dictionary addon, give the the option to set that dictionaries language as the new spell-check language across all tabs: either as a popup ("Do you want to make this language the default?") or via a "Preferences" menu on the dictionary Addon.

 * Allow me to change the spellcheck language globally in the settings menu, or via some other part of the UI, but certainly not in the right-click menu.

I'm sure there are other solutions too. I realise that multi-language users may have significantly different use cases here, but it'd be nice to make this simple use case more discoverable.

Comment 1

[Paul Silaghi, QA [:pauly]]

Hi Thomi,
You can choose your preferred language (en-NZ) for displaying pages without installing any add-on and simply going to Edit/Preferences/Content/Languages.
More than that, you can install if you want to the en-GB Firefox build (en-NZ is not available here): ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/15.0b6-candidates/build1/linux-x86_64/
How does this sound to you?

Comment 2

[Thomi Richards]

Hi Paul,

Changing that setting does not seem to change the dictionary that the spell check component uses. It would be helpful if it did change the spellcheck language (but that's not how it seems to work right now).

Further, I'm running Ubuntu, and firefox is installed by default - it's bundled with the operating system on the install CD. I don't get a chance as to which build I install - I get the en-US version automatically. This will be the case for many Linux users.

Comment 3

[Paul Silaghi, QA [:pauly]]

(In reply to Thomi Richards from comment #2)
> Hi Paul,
> 
> Changing that setting does not seem to change the dictionary that the spell
> check component uses. It would be helpful if it did change the spellcheck
> language (but that's not how it seems to work right now).

Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant initially, that option is for something else. Indeed, it would be nice to have an option to change the spellcheck language near "Check my spelling as I type" in Tools/Options/Advanced/General.
Moving this bug to Enhancements.

> Further, I'm running Ubuntu, and firefox is installed by default - it's
> bundled with the operating system on the install CD. I don't get a chance as
> to which build I install - I get the en-US version automatically. This will
> be the case for many Linux users.

You can install separately the Firefox en-GB build (simply download it from here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/15.0b6-candidates/build1/linux-x86_64/en-GB/firefox-15.0b6.tar.bz2 and then extract it). This will set both the menus of the browser and the spellcheck language to en-GB.