Chromium-based Edge gets a much-needed basic feature: spellchecking

Chromium-based Edge has finally been graced with in-line spellchecking functionality, for those who are playing around with testing Microsoft’s revamped browser.

Preview builds of the new Chromium-powered spin on Edge (Dev and Canary versions) have been available to download since early April, and the Canary channel build v76.0.144.0 has just seen spellchecking go live, as spotted by MS PowerUser.

This is a pretty fundamental feature for a browser, and you can enable this handy piece of functionality in the Settings menu.

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However, according to observations on Reddit, not everyone has access to the spellchecker just yet, with the option being grayed out for some folks. It seems that Microsoft is doing some limited testing to begin with, before rolling the feature out more broadly, which is pretty much par for the course.

Spellcheck yourself before you wreck yourself

The spellcheck works as you would expect: right-click on a word, and if it’s misspelled, you’ll get suggestions of what the word should probably be, as well as the ability to add it to the dictionary if it is indeed a genuine word (you can also remove words from the dictionary if necessary).

It might seem strange that a basic capability such as spellchecking wasn’t in Chromium-based Edge earlier, but Microsoft has probably had to rework the feature to play nice with other platforms, seeing as the revamped Edge is not going to be tied purely to Windows 10, but will be available across all versions of Windows – and other operating systems for that matter.

Indeed, we recently heard that the macOS version of the browser could be here sooner than you think, and we might even see an initial reveal of the browser for the Mac at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in May.

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