By Jin Nan Goto

The lack of way of checking your spelling without having to download a third party plugin has been my biggest beef with Internet Explorer for a long time now. Internet Explorer is the only major browser that does not include tools to help check your spelling.  Firefox, Chrome and Safari all offer inline spellchecking which presents a red line under each misspelled word and offers suggestions when you right click them. IE on the other hand doesn’t offer anything and it’s absence makes it very difficult to use IE7 after using other browsers such as Firefox or Sarari.

I wrote an earlier post about using a plugin called IE7Pro to add inline spellchecking to IE.  However IE7Pro offers a lot of other features such as an ad-blocker and there are some people who simply want to check their spelling and not add another toolbar to their browser.  I found anther plugin that has a much smaller footprint called ieSpell.  ieSpell does not give inline spellchecking but it adds a single button to your toolbar that will check the spelling of your text fields. You can choose between US, UK and Canadian dictionaries and you are able to look up the definitions of words using Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary or Wikipedia. ieSpell is free for commercial use and you can get it at http://www.iespell.com