The Windows Spellcheck makes its way to Edge browser

May 29, 2020 04:33 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has recently announced that Microsoft Edge 83, which is already available for all supported desktop platforms, comes with a new spell checker, as it replaces Hunspell with Windows Spellcheck.

The company says that this improvement comes with a series of benefits, including support for additional languages, but it’s only available on Windows 8.1 and newer. In other words, if you’re still on Windows 7, you’re not getting the new spellcheck experience.

And of course, the same on macOS, as the Windows Spellcheck is only available on… well, Windows.

“Previously, on Windows, Microsoft Edge and other Chromium browsers used open-source proofing tools for spell checking. Moving to Windows Spellcheck has a number of benefits, including support for additional languages and dialects, a shared custom dictionary, and better support for URLs, acronyms, and email addresses,” Microsoft explains.

Developed with Google

In case you’re wondering who is the next big name to benefit from the Windows Spellcheck being added to the Chromium engine, yes, it’s Google. Microsoft and Google worked together to make this happen, as Microsoft itself explains.

“This feature was developed as a collaboration between Google and Microsoft engineers in the Chromium project, enabling all Chromium-based browsers to benefit from Windows Spellcheck integration. Our thanks go out to Guillaume Jenkins and Rouslan Solomakhin (Google), and Bruce Long, Luis Sanchez Padilla, and Siye Liu (Microsoft) for their collaboration on this feature,” the company says.

If you want to give this new feature a try, all you need to do is install Microsoft Edge version 83 on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Furthermore, if you’re trying to enable the new spellcheck experience for more languages in Microsoft Edge, make sure that you add them in the Settings screen of Windows 10 and then enable it from the browser.