Firefox Extension:

The idea:

The idea of this extension is to automatically correct spelling mistakes that lead you to an unreachable destination on the interwebnet. For instance if you typed http://wwww.hotmail.com/, http://wwwhotmail.com/ or http://www.hotmail.com./ These typing mistakes happen often (to me anyway) and it would be nice to have a browser recognise it and fix it automatically.

Possible typos to pick up:

Having 2 or 4 'w's

Missing a dot (probably only practical after "www" and before "com")

Extra punctuation at the end of the address "//", "./"

Commas instead of full-stops

Suggested name(s):

I cna tyep I like this one.

I liek to tpye

Ideas:

I guess the best place to start would be to catch all incoming 404 pages and parse the fuck out of them and get the address that they were looking for. Then run the address through a serious of tests (1 for each type of mistake) and then use the best solution, or provide a list of possible corrections. This sounds like fun (at least to me cos I'm anal. I'd be happy to help out writing the tests. I think it would be cool to do two levels of testing: firstly obvious stuff like the commas and extra w's and a second round that could do more ambiguous stuff. If something is found in the first round then it could be fixed automatically and the second round could prompt the user for corrections.)

i very much agree, and have always wondered why this has never been done byt hte browser before. I always thought that it should keep trying to correct the error until it got a page (ie a 200 or 300 http code). Some plugins (firefox) are able to make a little bar at the top of the page (ie allow popup, install plugin..) to present a dropdown menu of all the plausible addresses made I think it would be best to have it try once automatically, then maybe present options (in the form of a bar if possible, I like that idea). A user shouldn't have to click again unless it is necesary.