Since Microsoft announced the migration of Microsoft Edge browser to Chromium, the company has been constantly making improvements to the engine, including features that would soon be available in the likes of Google Chrome and Vivaldi.
Microsoft is now working on another such major change, and this time it concerns a feature that’s available natively in Windows 10.
Microsoft wants the Windows spell checker to become an option in Chromium browser, and the company has already started the work in this regard.
Flag already available in Chrome Canary
A commit (via WL) describes how the Windows Spell Checker can replace Hunspell, the engine that is currently used by very popular software solutions, including not only Google Chrome, but also productivity suites like LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
“This CL aims to implement windows spellchecker integration in Chromium project, so that user can switch to use windows spellchecker or hunspell spellchecker at run time. We need to implement platform agnostic interfaces to integrate windows spellchecker into Chromium. We also need to refactor some code to enable runtime switch between Windows spellchecker and hunspell spellchecker,” the commit reads.
The latest version of Google Chrome Canary already comes with a flag called “Use the Windows OS spellchecker,” but enabling it doesn’t seem to produce any significant changes.
On the other hand, this flag is yet to make its way to Microsoft Edge browser, and this could be an indication that Microsoft is still working on the feature, and it could take a while until it goes live in the Canary version of the app.
Microsoft Edge Canary and Dev are currently available on both Windows and macOS, but the Windows spell checker would obviously not be available on the latter. A Linux version of Edge is also believed to be planned, but Microsoft is yet to offer a confirmation in this regard.
https://news.softpedia.com/news/windows-could-soon-power-the-google-chrome-spell-checker-526632.shtml