Browser feature detection: spell checking?

Question

All the decent browsers (Chrome, FX, etc) now support built-in spell checking.

However the popular but rubbish axis of IE doesn't (not even IE8 - pointless 'accelerators': yes, much needed dictionary support: no). Unless you download an excellent free plugin, but you can't expect corp users to do that.

Our clients want spell checking in the enterprise web app that we supply, so we bought in a 3rd party spell checking component to keep them happy. It works, but isn't terribly good - especially when compared to anything built in to the browser.

It also looks like the spell check dialog in Word 2000 (probably current back when it was developed). Not such a problem for our clients, half of whom are stuck on Office 2000 and IE6.

I want to only enable this component when the user doesn't have built in spell checking.

Does anyone know a way to detect this?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is possible even with something like browsercap or Microsoft Browser Definition File Schema, as mentioned above it is kind of outside the allowed scope.

Have you considered just going with a server side spell checker? So they can use the client if they like or click the spell check button like in GMail. This also means that you can control any updates to the dictionary.

Answer 2

You already know which browsers have built-in support and which browsers don't so you may use some form of browser sniffing to decide whether you enable the spell-checking component or not.

You may also try to ask your users if they already have some spell-checking enabled and let them answer Yes/No/Don't know. If they don't know, fall back to automatic detection. This is better than using sniffing only because sniffing is known to be unreliable in some circumstances.

Detecting things that are part of a browser's UI is hard, if possible. Due to browsers' security policies, a web site can't access most part of the API that could expose something useful for feature detection. And even if security was not a problem, you would probably still face one distinct API for every browser, since internal browser mechanics are not standardized.