I Am Animated Virus

When I wrote my last post, Firefox 7 Released, Mozilla had just launched version 7. Now they are on version 9, and soon they’ll hit 12! Today, I want to highlight a frustrating problem with the spell-checking processors we use daily.

Let’s take my name, Anirudha, as an example. Look at what happens when I type it into different software:

• Windows Live Writer: It offers absolutely no suggestions. It just highlights the word with a red squiggly line.
• Microsoft Word 2007: This handles it slightly better. When I type “anirudha”, it auto-capitalizes it to “Anirudha” as an autocorrection.
• Firefox Nightly: When I write “anirudha” in a textbox, the spellchecker bizarrely suggests “Ludhiana”. (For those wondering, Ludhiana is a city in India).
• Google Chrome: In Chrome, the spellchecker completely loses its mind. It provides a list of highly inaccurate suggestions, including:
  1. Aniakchak
  2. Antivirus
  3. Animated
  4. Aniseed

In HTML5, if the spellcheck attribute is not explicitly set to false, the browser will automatically try to spell-check text inputs. However, these spell-check algorithms are clearly optimized exclusively for standard English dictionaries. They often hurt productivity rather than improve it when a user is typing non-English words or names. According to Chrome, I am an “animated virus”!

Thanks for reading!