Help Me Get Autocorrect into my life - please

January 10, 2022 6:24 AM

Up until a short while ago all of my computers would auto correct or suggest the correct spelling (this function works on Meta-filter but nowhere else that I can recall) but now my browsers do not react to misspelled words and I'm not understanding why. I am using: OS - Windows 7 and 8.1 Browsers - Brave and Palemoon If I deliberately will misspell something it appears with a red line underneath the word but it will not suggest the correct spelling. I have Auto correct and Spelling both checked in browsers and Windows. What is going on and how can I fix this? Thank you!
posted by watercarrier to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

My guess is that something broke between your browser and your very very old operating system that Microsoft stopped supporting 2 years ago. Please please work on getting a new computer or upgrading the operating system, your current one is almost certainly compromised.
posted by rockindata at 7:09 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

Upgrading to windows 10 is a great first step. Upgrading to chrome is a great second step. I don't know many that don't use chrome these days, and if they do, they are aware of downgrades in certain services (like spell check) in trade for other features (being paid, anonymity, etc)
posted by bbqturtle at 7:30 AM on January 10, 2022

Response by poster: @bbqturtle - Brave uses Chrome's infrastructure afaik.
posted by watercarrier at 7:57 AM on January 10, 2022

I also use pale moon (I know it's old but I like it). Misspelled words get underlined but not corrected. btw win10.
You can get a suggestion by right clicking on the underlined word.
Pale moon forever!
posted by H21 at 8:19 AM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

As I understand it, Brave more or less exists because the Mozilla Foundation wasn't inclusive enough of this dude's homophobic political activity. That dude is now also ardently anti-mask and anti-lockdown, fwiw, I would not trust the safety culture of his organization farther than I could throw it while remaining socially distanced from it. It also uses a cryptocurrency token to distribute ad revenue.

Sure, Brave is based on Chromium, the open-source variant of Chrome. So are lots and lots of pieces of malware masquerading as usable web browsers.

Pale Moon is based on Firefox, meaning it gets some of Firefox's security improvements, but much slower than actual Firefox. Unlike Firefox, Chrome, Edge, or Safari, it continues to support NPAPI plugins, which is a glaring information security issue.

Firefox from Mozilla and Chrome from Google are the complete list of good modern web browsers, as far as I'm concerned. Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari are okay, if you need certain kinds of operating system integration.

Also, yes, upgrade off of Windows 7 to a supported operating system, for goodness' sake.
posted by All Might Be Well at 8:26 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

So first, I completely agree with what people are saying about upgrading your OS and also using better browsers -- specifically about Brave being pretty shady, for reasons that have to do with its business practices and not just its founder's obnoxiousness. I'm pretty sure Microsoft still lets people upgrade W7 and W8 for free even though the official upgrade period is over, if cost is a consideration.

However! If you want to try to debug this, you could try making a blank profile for Pale Moon (I assume it supports profiles like firefox does), or just reinstalling, and seeing if you're still getting the same behavior there. You could also install FF or Chrome just to check that it's working there and isn't a case of the OS somehow interfering with something that spellcheck relies on. Another thing to check is whether your browsers are set to use the correct dictionary in the preferences.

For what it's worth I'm using Firefox right now and, like H21 and this article describe, misspelled words get underlined in red, with suggested corrections showing up when I right-click the word. (I don't think autocorrect - as in changing your actual spelling while you type - has ever been built in to FF.) Is that your expected behavior, or do you expect something different?
posted by trig at 9:27 AM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

You will need to use a browser plug-in like Grammarly for in-browser autocorrect on a Windows desktop.
posted by Lil' Blue Goat at 10:59 AM on January 10, 2022

1. Yes, do the free upgrade to Windows 10 so your operating system is fully supported and not beginning to break in ill-documented ways. You can still download the upgrade even though all the alleged upgrade deadlines have passed. I've upgraded more than a dozen Windows 7 machines without any complications; there's just no reason not to do this first.

2. Since when did browsers autocorrect misspellings? How on earth would you search for misspellings if your browser autocorrected you? I use the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome, and when I type in Lieca it drops down Leica as a suggestion, but if I don't choose the suggestion it searches for what I told it to search for. To my mind, that's what it's supposed to do. From my memory, that's what it has always done. (Tip: That's how to get a cheap Leica camera on eBay.)
posted by Scarf Joint at 1:17 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]