Tags: epiphany | ubuntu | web-browsers

One of the dirty little secrets of Linux, and Ubuntu in particular, is that it often has as much bloat as other operating systems. While Ubuntu often doesn't take as many resources as Windows, resources can be at a shortage. That's why I often find I turn to Epiphany Browser on Ubuntu. This is a nice little browser that works fast without taking up all the memory and cpu utilisation the Firefox often does.

However, unlike Firefox its a bit rough around the edges. And one of these rough patches is spelling. The following tips will let you enable spelling in Epiphany...

First of all read this thread at UbuntuForums. This will explain how spelling should work in Epiphany. (Enter about:config in url, and then set layout.spellcheckDefault to 1. "spellchecker.dictionary" lets you set up the language. Experimenting shows that only en_US will be remembered.) The problem is that the version included with Jaunty doesn't allow you set this.

Next get the latest version of Epiphany from Ephiphany Downloads and untar somewhere.

Make sure your system has the relevent build tools installed:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev python-enchant

Go to where you untarred epiphany-browser. Then perform the configure, make and install dance with:

./configure --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2 --disable-mailnews --disable-ldap --disable-debug --disable-tests 
--enable-optimize --enable-crypto --enable-xft --with-system-zlib --enable-spell-checker
make
sudo make install

!! NB: The configure line should be all one line... !!

If you're successful, you should have a shiny new Epiphany browser at /usr/local/bin/epiphany. Launch this and now try to set spelling up. It should work this time. Yaaay...! Close this browser, and make sure its closed. Then open the distribution version of Epiphany in /usr/bin/epiphany. Spelling should be enabled. You can now delete your version of epiphany as this can lead the system being confused as to which version of Epiphany is the right one.

Unfortunately,  there doesn't seem to a UI for correcting spellings. However I can guarantee that your spelling will improve since you will now have to actually learn to spell...!