2017
submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

The Firefox browser now has a built-in page translator that works even without the Internet::Mozilla has announced the release of an update to its Firefox browser. In version number 118, users will find a significant innovation - a built-in translator

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[-] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 143 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As a long term Firefox user, I've been disappointed with Mozilla's decisions in the recent years, but this is awesome. This is the kind of features Firefox should be receiving instead of useless UI changes.

[-] demonquark@lemmy.world 117 points 1 year ago

As long as Mozilla remains committed to a free and open internet, I will remain a faithful firefox user.

Even if every update after this one is a useless UI change. :p

[-] Darorad@lemmy.world 48 points 1 year ago

Are you saying you don't want a button that looks like a pinned tab that only lets you change between a handful of time-limited themes?

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[-] danc4498@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

For a born again Firefox user, what decisions?

[-] meiko60@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 year ago
[-] shotgun_crab@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Or rather removing PWA support

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[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 90 points 1 year ago

Only these languages though:

Bulgarian
Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
[-] MashedTech@lemmy.world 59 points 1 year ago
[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

Yeah but these websites are usually already localized in English at least to some extent. Many Asian websites would benefit much more from this.

[-] ours@lemmy.film 10 points 1 year ago

There's an edge case for Switzerland with 4 official languages but German being the majority. Many websites and documents "forget" to translate into other minority languages.

[-] natryamar@lemm.ee 22 points 1 year ago

I need japanese, any news on if that will happen?

[-] drmoose@lemmy.world 33 points 1 year ago

No news on that though AFAIK that's the most requested one. As other comment pointed out currently these languages are WIP:

  • Russian
  • Persian (Farsi)
  • Icelandic
  • Norwegian Nynorsk
  • Norwegian Bokmål
  • Ukrainian
  • Dutch

Personally I'd like to see more asian languages as that part of the web is lacking English but those languages are much harder to implement and all of this contribution here is mostly by European universities and organizations.

[-] UlrikHD@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago

Nynorsk supporters just never quit do they. Half the country wants it gone and less than 10 percent of the country uses it, still it's on the list while Swedish and Danish aren't, lmao.

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[-] rambaroo@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

That's really not good. Literally all of these are European languages.

I'd rather have it connected to a better translation service than have it be offline. I don't understand why the translator working offline is even a plus. It's a web browser.

I assume there must not be any FOSS translation services they can use so this offline translator is just a consequence of that.

[-] gamer@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's for privacy purposes. An online translator requires that all the text you're reading be sent to a third party, which may or may not use it for nefarious purposes. E.g. maybe you translate your bank account's web page because there's a word you don't know, and now Google knows how much money you have in your bank account.

If you don't care about that kind of privacy, then there's no reason you couldn't use an existing online translator. Firefox has always supported that.

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[-] jman6495@lemmy.ml 61 points 1 year ago

Glad to see this has made it into the browser! This has been a 🇪🇺 funded project for years now!

[-] Dave@lemmy.nz 54 points 1 year ago

This was prieviously available as an addon/extension. It's really cool they are able to do this locally, and it works well.

[-] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For anyone interested in the tech behind that, it's based on Project Bergamot: https://browser.mt/software (now you don't need the extension anymore).

[-] scala@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You still need an extension for certain languages. It seems like they only have about a dozen available, a few more on the way, and hardly any eastern languages yet.

Production

  • Spanish
  • Estonian
  • English
  • German
  • Czech
  • Bulgarian
  • Portuguese
  • Italian
  • French
  • Polish

Development

  • Russian
  • Persian (Farsi)
  • Icelandic
  • Norwegian Nynorsk
  • Norwegian Bokmål
  • Ukrainian
  • Dutch
[-] marius851000@lemmy.mariusdavid.fr 39 points 1 year ago

I’ve been using for a few months. Here is my opinion:

  • Translation quality is still far from good, but is good enought to be understandable.
  • Can’t translate PDF files (hope it could do it in the future, even if that mean reflowing it)
  • The extension allowed to keep translating this tab. That’s a future that, in my opinion, would be highly appreciated in the built-in translator (instead of enabling the "always translate").
  • The language choice doesn’t correspond with what I usually need (which is chinese. But I know chinese is notably hard to translate.)
  • It seems that translation into french first goes thought a first pass of english translation. While this still produce readable result, targeting english is for now probably the best option (even thought the cost of implementing a new language translation pair doesn’t seems too high, I understand they might prioritise adding more language, at least for now. Actually, I should probably contribute to this myself if I care as much about it)
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[-] ColdWater@lemmy.ca 30 points 1 year ago

Yo can I have that picture in high resolution for my desktop wallpaper?

[-] xusontha@ls.buckodr.ink 13 points 1 year ago

Go to the actual article, the image is there

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[-] Batbro@sh.itjust.works 29 points 1 year ago

Common Firefox W

[-] wesley@yall.theatl.social 26 points 1 year ago

I'm guessing this isn't on mobile yet?

The number of languages available is pretty small but I do appreciate them trying to respect users privacy with this feature

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[-] systemglitch@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago

This was the last thing I actively used chrome for, time to fully switch over I guess now that I can translate my Russian tracker.

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[-] quantum_mechanic@sh.itjust.works 23 points 1 year ago

This is a game changer for me. I always loved Firefox and tried to use it exclusively, but living in a foreign country is hard when you're learning the language, and I had to switch to chrome sometimes due to the lack of translation in Firefox. Now I can finally remove Chrome!

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 year ago

This is odd to me, there have always been translation extensions for Firefox, why swap to Chrome instead of just using one of the many translation options?

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[-] SwellowTheSun@mander.xyz 9 points 1 year ago

Look for the TWP extension. It's a fucking godsend, and it's way faster than FF's built in translator.

Sadly it uses Google on the backend, so it's less privacy friendly.

[-] shotgun_crab@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

That's a sick firefox fanart or whatever

[-] SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 9 points 1 year ago

It reminds me of the internet of early 2000s

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[-] hiramfromthechi@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

Why does this Firefox thumbnail go so hard tho

[-] Treczoks@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

While this is theoretically a neat feature, how can I stop it? I don't want it to offer translation of each and any English page into my native tongue. As most of the Internet is English, this thing pops up everywhere, and at least for English I don't need it. This is as annoying as Clippy was.

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[-] BrightCandle@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

I was using the beta before this and its nice to have it inbuilt but its not quite as good as the beta was. The main drawback with the new approach is that you can't force the translation if it thinks the page is in English. I use self hosted RSS and I have Translated subsections on that and unfortunately I can't get the new translator to do the job where the beta would.

[-] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago

Great! I'm assuming the translation models need to be downloaded before first time use? Or are they so tiny in size that they include all of them with the main browser installation?

[-] nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago

I quickly tried yesterday and I could do it seamlessly, it worked very well. If you go to the preferences there's a option to download the languages in parts of 100-200MB/each.

[-] JackFromWisconsin@midwest.social 14 points 1 year ago

I just realized FF didn't have a built in translator a week ago. Excited to see it come!

[-] slaacaa@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

Would be good to have this in the mobile/tablet versions also (I just checked and didn’t see it), as this is my main reason for still using chrome

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[-] Faresh@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

How will this offline translator affect Firefox's memory usage? The article mentioned that it currently only supports 9 languages. If I choose a source language will it be able to translate to all other 8 languages? Why didn't they use existing open-source software like Apertium (or did they?)?

[-] Strawberry 10 points 1 year ago

It has multiple translation providers to choose from, but only shows the logo and not a name. I have no idea what the logos are except google translate

[-] tablesitter@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

But they killed the fox in their new logo :(

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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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