I noticed, using Firefox 142.0 (snap) on Xubuntu 24.04, that the spell checker suddenly started underlining as mistakes lots of French words containing the “accent circonflexe” diacritic (^). I tried lots of words and finally noticed that the spell checker was adhering to what’s explained here: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_circonflexe_en_fran%C3%A7ais#Orthographe_recommand%C3%A9e_depuis_1990 Indeed, it is not just about this diacritic: I tried a bunch of things and “oignon” gets underlined, with “ognon” popping up as a suggestion instead. Same thing with “nénuphar” becoming “nénufar”.

While I have nothing in particular against the 1990 simplified spelling rules, the fact that it is forced here (rather than accepting both) makes it look a bit like a bug. Especially considering that:

I saw nothing related in the 142.0 release notes (assuming it started there, but it may have been one or two patches before…), nor anywhere else.
At roughly the same time, on my parents’ machine, the whole French language pack disappeared: their Firefox GUI got suddenly set to English and I had to re-download the French language in the settings.

Note that I personally only have the English language pack, and no dictionary add-on whatsoever (see screenshot below). It had been working fine that way until now. Downloading the French dictionary https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dictionnaire-fran%C3%A7ais1/ (note that it is explicitly separated from the “simplified spelling” version: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/corecteur-ortografe-simplifiee/) changes nothing.

I don’t know how spell-checking works without explicit dictionary add-ons, but the fact is that I have all flavors of French suggested in the spell-check settings:

Maybe it relies on the OS, but other apps still have the old behavior. And the only French-ish things in my OS (that I can think of…) are my timezone, my keyboard layout (bépo), and perhaps a LibreOffice hyphenation package. Even aspell dicts lists only en variants. And nothing in tree /usr/share/dict* | grep -i fr. But Chromium also has French (and German for some reason?), and Geany can also check spelling in French (but both of them still do it with the old spellings). I wonder if it came with a GTK update: libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0, libwebkitgtk-6.0-4, and a bunch of GTK JavaScript-related packages got installed through upgrades recently.

On my parents’ machine (same OS, same Firefox version), only “goût” is accepted, not “gout”, so it’s the opposite of mine. But as both Ubuntu and Firefox do phasing, I can’t even take version numbers for granted… (For example, the “tab groups” feature arrived on my machine multiple versions after it was announced and described as “available” in the Firefox release notes.)

The inconsistency between apps – and all those needless red underlines – are a bit distracting.

So: Is that a bug or a feature? And if that’s a bug, where is it coming from and is there anything I can do (preferably not something too risky, as this “issue” is probably not worth any fix attempt that would put the system at risk)? Also, any link to something official-ish about such a change would be welcome.

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