Relates, in that if the TinyMCE editor is upgraded the spell checking capabilities of the browsers should be taken into account as part of testing.

This is important as I have a number of non technical people using the system (or at least I'm trying to get them to use it) who are used to products like WORD, and this issue is making it very difficult to get them to move - or they are giving up using Confluence and I am going to have a hard job getting them back if this is not sorted out soon. Most of these users would not be able to use Wiki markup (i.e. to do the spell checking); one of the main reasons for moving to Confluence was it was easy for the users to use and had a WYSIWYG editor. As a documentation source it is not much good if you can not easily spell check.

There are a number of earlier issues related to spell checkers in the JIRA area, which were closed because the browser plug-ins were available - these same comments are just as relevant to Confluence, e.g. see:

JRA-10080, JRA-10475, JRA-1629

Particularly re last one see comment at end by Brian Lane [JIRA Product Manager] - what is mentioned regarding JIRA is just as important for Confluence

On looking at this further, the issue only occurs using the WYSIWYG editor, Firefox spell checking works fine using the Wiki Markup editor.

So the problem is with TinyMCE. I suspect the problem was introduced with the later version of TinyMCE that came with our last Confluence upgrade, to 2.10.1. I do not remember this being a problem before the upgrade.

Now on looking for Firefox Spellcheck problems with TinyMCE there are lots of posts, including similar issues with Drupal and Wordpress.

The answer seems to be the gecko_spellcheck setting, by default is False - this is to enable the TinyMCE spell checker, which is not be enabled in Confluence, so it should not be a problem to set this to True. See:
http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Configuration/gecko_spellcheck

I got to here from this page:
http://drupal.org/node/135150

So the question now is, how do we switch this setting to True? Is this something I can do (advice on how) or does it need to be in a future release of Confluence?

I also experience this problem. Have tried in Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.08

Again even if the spell checker is manually toggled on, it does not persist.

I do not want an additional spell checker as described in issue CONF-1212, I just want the Firefox one to work as it does with other systems.

Note: as I type in here, i.e. in Jira, the Firefox spell checker works fine.

We also run Jira and in our version the Firefox spell checker works fine.

It is a problem using these two products from the same supplier and getting different results, both products are used extensively by our users.

In the case of Confluence, we want this to be our major documentation repository, and with this spelling issue some of our users are returning to Word

How do we move this issue from minor to major? Is this based on voting?