Newer versions of Android WebView and Android Chrome are no longer compatible with the spellcheck attribute

[Lukenickerson]

What type of issue is this?

Incorrect support data (example: BrowserX says "86" but support was added in "40")

What information was incorrect, unhelpful, or incomplete?

The browser compatibility listing for the spellcheck HTML attribute (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/spellcheck#browser_compatibility) lists WebView 47 and Android Chrome v47 as working. What I've found in my own testing is that WebView v91 does allow spellchecking, whereas WebView v119 does not. Also in Android Chrome v119 you'll see there are no settings for spellcheck.

I suspect that spellcheck was disabled at some point in WebView (and thus also Chrome Android). You'll see that last year in 2022 there were a number of articles about "spell-jacking", warning that Chrome and other browsers could leak passwords.

Related SO post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/77495626/1766230

What browsers does this problem apply to, if applicable?

No response

What did you expect to see?

Ideally for Android WebView and Android Chrome there would be a version range listed as compatible with the spellcheck attribute, and then a version range where it is no longer compatible.

At very least there should be some kind of warning that this data is potentially incorrect.

Did you test this? If so, how?

I added the spellcheck attribute to a field with misspellings, and ran it in a Cordova Android app -- both in an emulator with an older version of WebView (v91), and deployed to an actual Android tablet with newer versions of WebView (both v116 and v119). In the old version of WebView, the red squiggle lines showed up under the misspellings, whereas with the new WebView versions, nothing happened.

Can you link to any release notes, bugs, pull requests, or MDN pages related to this?

I could not find any release information about this from Google or the WebView team. Sadly WebView doesn't appear to be in GitHub, with Issues and discussions easily accessible.

Do you have anything more you want to share?

No response

MDN URL

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/spellcheck

MDN metadata

MDN page report details

• Query: html.global_attributes.spellcheck
• Report started: 2023-11-16T14:07:19.060Z

[skyclouds2001]

I guess this might be a reason of a browser setting which disable the spell and grammar check

for chrome 120, this is Settings -> Languages -> Spell check, the setting must be enabled to allow spellcheck