When I attended WordCamp Boston in early January, I had the chance to meet Raphael Mudge again, a man who is composed of nuclear energy. He showed me some interesting stats that I hope he makes public soon but he also gave me a glimpse into the extension that was being created for FireFox. I mentioned to Raffi that it would be awesome to have an extension that blew the FireFox spell checker out of the water or at least, worked in conjunction with it. I’m happy to see that the AtD FireFox extension is now available for download. After installation, the extension will be activated on any text area that is detected. This is identified by a little green ABC icon in the bottom right corner of the text area. One of the best parts of the extension is that it will notify you if you are about to send something that has errors if you haven’t scanned the text before hitting the submit button.
The extension takes things a bit further though, enabling you to check for jargon, double negatives, passive voice, and other nuiances. I already have it installed and it works just fine in FireFox 3.6. Now I have an easy way to write better comments all across the web.
A very nice extension, but since it doesn’t work in Gmail’s HTML mode, it’s not very useful for me. I suppose that’s the “fault” of Gmail, but there it is.