The newest stable version of Chrome will soon be available for download. According to Google Software Engineer Rachel Petterson, who announced the news on the official Chrome Blog yesterday, it’s a minor update, so you don’t get a slew of new, exciting features. However, what you will get is better in-browser spell checking. The “Ask Google for suggestions” feature can now check for grammatical inaccuracies, and uncapitalized and misspelled proper nouns. It can even detect homonyms and do some context-sensitive spell checking. For example, it will tell you if you need to use “affect” instead of “effect,” or vice versa.
Additionally, dictionary support was added for Tamil, Albanian, and Korean, so you don’t have to stare at squiggly red lines underneath your words if you frequently type in any of those languages. Dictionary tweakers will also be glad to know that you now only have to add words to the dictionary once and then simply sync your settings so the Chrome browser on your phone, tablet, or second computer can also recognize the words.
The new version of Chrome will start rolling out in the coming weeks for Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS users; Mac users will have to wait a bit longer. Simply click “Customize and control Google Chrome,” and choose “About Google Chrome” from the menu to download the update.
If you don’t like the thought of Google Chrome monitoring every word you type, you can temporarily disable the spell-checker by right-clicking the text field and selecting “Spell-checker options” (PC) or “Spelling and Grammer” (Mac). Then, unclick “Check the spelling of this field” (PC) or “Check spelling while typing” (Mac).
