I don't think this is currently on our near-term roadmap. This is probably low priority because it seems that a large proportion of devices don't provide a spellcheck service at all, and so unfortunately doesn't really benefit the majority of users :(
torne@, I don't think it's fair to say that a large proportion of devices don't provide a spellcheck service. I tried these:
BlackBerry PRIV (Android 6.0)
BlackBerry Motion (Android 7.1)
Google Nexus 6P (Android 8.1)
Google Pixel 2 (Android 8.1)
HTC One (Android 5.0)
HTC One M9 (Android 6.0)
Moto X 2nd gen (Android 6.0)
Samsung Galaxy S8 (Android 7.0)
They all supported spellcheck (red underline of misspelled words) in an HTML textarea in Chrome. All of them supported spellcheck by default except for the Samsung Galaxy S8, where I had to enable spellcheck in the keyboard settings.
Or is there something else I need to be looking for instead of that test?
Tim would know more details but while we were implementing this feature we discovered a large number of devices that don't provide a spellchecking service. A number of devices implement their own spellcheck functionality in the IME, but that's not something that chrome/webview can directly use itself (it's entirely up to the IME what happens there), since this isn't an implementation of the system API in question. This made it quite hard to test this feature on a representative sample of devices since many of them simply couldn't support it.
I don't have a Galaxy S8 to check but if the option is in the keyboard settings then that suggests it's probably *not* an actual android spellchecking service, but Samsung's settings app may categorise things differently. In AOSP the spellchecker is a separate thing to the selected IME and would be expected to be shown as an option where you can potentially choose between multiple different spellchecking services, not just a toggle, though I suspect that devices only have one installed by default.
It's possible the landscape has changed or that we were just looking at a different sample of devices, but it didn't look good before. :/
@torne
@lquinn
I honestly think this is more important than its being made out to be- Spell check was introduced in 1981, I would think this is something in 2018 is a no brainier.
Comment 1 by timvolod...@chromium.org
, Jul 19 2016