I’m a 100% sold-out fan of Firefox 2.0. I know IE7 just released, but I have yet to read a review of it that tempts me to make the switch. In fact, everything I read has the opposite affect. When Micro$oft tries to force-feed IE7 to my Windows machine via Automatic Updates, it won’t get past me clicking, “Yeah right, I don’t think so.”

One limitation I’ve found with [tag]Firefox 2.0[/tag], though, is correcting misspelled words I accidentally add to its dictionary. Several times I’ve accidentally clicked “Add to dictionary” instead of selecting the correctly spelled suggestion. Doh! Now how do I get into the customized dictionary of Firefox and fix it?

Fixing misspelled words in Firefox 2.0’s dictionary isn’t really that difficult if you know where to look. Just follow these directions:

1. Close Firefox.
2. Browse to your Firefox profile and make a backup copy of persdict.dat just in case you need it later. (Where is my Firefox profile?)
3. Open the file persdict.dat with a plain text editor (i.e. Notepad).
4. You’ll see a list of all the custom words added to Firefox’s dictionary. Simply correct the misspelled word, save the file, and close it.
5. Open Firefox and consider it done.

Posted on October 28, 2006