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[melba_frilkins]

Help! I will award a virtual chocolate cake to anyone who can solve my problem.

With my online discussion boards (via ANGEL) when I go to grade a student's responses, it gives me a nice pop-up window with that only the one student's posts. I would like to be able to do an instant spell check of that page (that is, to spell-check the content within the pop-up window).

Is there a Firefox add-on (or some other way) to quickly check the spelling on a webpage? I am using Firefox 3.6. The "Spell Checker" add-on looks promising, but it's only good for older versions of Firefox.

I know that I can copy/paste text into Word/Writer and spell-check from there, but I'm too lazy for that.

If there's a way to do this with a different browser, I'd be glad to try that as well.

[temporaryname]

If you feel pretty sure of yourself technologically, you can get the Nightly Tester Tools extension, which can force extensions for older Firefox versions to work on current versions. (It can also break your installation of Firefox pretty badly if you don't know what you're doing, though, so there's a risk there.)

[galactic_hedgehog]

Another way to do it is to go into the extensions folder and then into the folder for the extension you want to force to work (you'll have to hunt a little bit to make sure which is the right folder, since they have names like {95f24680-9e31-11da-a746-0800200c9a66}; look in the chrome subfolder).  With Firefox closed, open the install.rdf file with a text editor (notepad or wordpad on a PC, NOT MS Word).  Look for the line that specifies the "maxVersion" number and change it to or "3.*" or even something higher.  Save the changes and exit.  (I'd recommend making a backup before you edit the file.)  When you restart Firefox, check to see if the extension is working (you may have to enable it from the add-ons menu).

[melba_frilkins]

Thanks. Maybe I will try one of those. Either method would be stretching my abilities, but what is the worst thing that could happen: having to delete and re-install Firefox? Or something worse?

One possible problem, however, is that I never had the "Spell-Checker" installed, and it refuses to install from the website because I have the newer Firefox. Maybe I have to go back to 3.5, add the extension, and then update to 3.6 and the force the extension?

Does any of this make sense, or should I leave well enough alone? I do enjoy learning new tricks, but don't want to royally screw up my computer. (Oh, maybe I should do this on my office computer....)

[galactic_hedgehog]

You could edit the install.rdf file before installing it.  Download the extension and unzip it (The .xpi file is really a zip file; just change the extension to .zip first).  Edit the file, rezip, change the extension back, and install it by opening the file with Firefox.

[galactic_hedgehog]

Decided to give it a try.  Changing the rdf file works, no problem.  In order to get it with Firefox 3.6, you'll need to you to the version history page and RIGHT click on the "Add to Firefox" button and select "Save as..."  Then unzip, edit, zip, and install.