We already know that spell checkers are not perfect.
Are you really speaking on behalf of every single reader, here? Most people aren't aware of the actual downsides of using a spellchecker in shorthand text mediums-- you know, ones where full sentences are not the norm (aka. IRC). I'm bringing this to light.
On a side note, as your own image shows, Chrome doesn't underline any part of u r gr8, which sort of ruins the point you were trying to make there.
It doesn't really ruin it, no. You're forgetting an important point about mIRC. It's not Chrome. The dictionary mIRC uses may or may not catch those words. It's possible that Chrome specifically curates its dictionary to ignore words with numbers in them (something mIRC would have to mimick, unless the library does this automatically), as well as "words" that are 1 letter long. Note that I asked a question, I didn't provide an answer. The question was: "how will mIRC react to these sentences?" -- the answer is, it's hard to predict whether it will do the right thing, given an arbitrary example. Congratulations, Chrome (not mIRC) did the right thing for one of them. In English (would it work in Arabic? Russian?). That's a very specific and small victory.
Also, "if you are the type of person who uses terms like 'ur' ... you will disable it" isn't really the point. Again, "ur" is just one example of a false positive.
You are assuming that all false positives come from someone who doesn't "care" about spelling to begin with. I gave many examples of when that would not be true. For instance, I care about spelling. I'm very conscientious about my spelling. And yet, in this reply alone, Chrome has made me question whether I spelled "mimick" correctly (I did, Chrome doesn't have the variant spelling in its dictionary), thereby wasting my time. This is fine and dandy on a forum where my answer will stick around, but on IRC my answer will disappear into the backbuffer in a few minutes time, so I would not waste my time googling to make sure mIRC is making the right call every time something pops up red.
Again, this is just me-- but the question is, how many people are like me? And how many people would actually benefit from a
very imperfect spell checker? This seems more like a cost benefit issue to me. Yes, in a perfect world, we could add every single feature you wanted. This is reality, where it really doesn't make sense to spend a large amount of effort (the editbox would need to be completely redesigned, a spellcheck would need to be integrated, dictionaries curated in multiple languages) so that a handful of people catch 30% more spelling errors. If you can prove that the feature would be more effective/useful, that would be more convincing. Implementing something that is known to not be very effective seems... ineffective.
