A commit discovered a few weeks ago revealed that Microsoft wanted to bring the Windows spell checker to all Chromium-based browsers, including here not only Google Chrome, but also its very own Microsoft Edge.

Today, it looks like this feature has received the final go-ahead, as the flag to enable the Windows spell checker was implemented in Google Chrome for testing purposes.

“Add feature flag for Windows native spellchecker. The Windows native spellchecker is in the process of being integrated to

Chromium. To facilitate manual testing, this CL adds a chrome://flags entry to easily enable / disable the use of the native spellchecker on Windows,” a post on the Chromium Gerrit reads.Feature still in testing stage

At this point, Google Chrome uses the Hunspell spell checker, which is the same engine that powers famous productivity suites like LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The new Windows spell checker would only be offered on versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge running on Microsoft’s operating system.

“This CL aims to implement windows spellchecker integration in Chromium project, so that user can switch to use windows spellchecker or hunspell spellchecker at run time. We need to implement platform agnostic interfaces to integrate windows spellchecker into Chromium. We also need to refactor some code to enable runtime switch between Windows spellchecker and hunspell spellchecker,” the original commit explained.

The new spell checker is still in its early days at this point, so it could take a while until it makes its way to production builds. The next stable version of Google Chrome is release 77 due on September 10.

Meanwhile, the good news is that Microsoft has rapidly become one of the key contributors to the development of Chromium. This means Microsoft Edge itself can become a better browser thanks to the adoption of this engine, and the software giant can work together with companies like Google for the development of new features.