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
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.
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
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?
But at the very least you can remove it
Im saying I don’t care.
I open browser search and consume the results. I don’t care for what buttons it has or doesn’t. I’m just happy it’s not Chrome or Edge.
For a born again Firefox user, what decisions?
no PWA support
Or rather removing PWA support
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You can use a handful of add-ons with default Firefox for Android, otherwise you can use whatever add-ons you want in Firefox Nightly/Fennec/Iceraven through setting up collections. You can disable pull to refresh in settings.
…I like the tab button…
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Firefox Android used to have an actual tabs bar? Interesting
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I can’t seem to find the setting. Is it not available for Firefox for Android (Fenix), do you know?
Yea probs not
Only these languages though:
Bulgarian Dutch English French German Italian Polish Portuguese SpanishStill impressive
Yeah but these websites are usually already localized in English at least to some extent. Many Asian websites would benefit much more from this.
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.
I need japanese, any news on if that will happen?
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.
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.
We already have one language.
Yes but what about a second language?
Me, too. I end up using TWP, and that works pretty well, minus the fact that it’s filtered through either Google Translate, Bing, Yandex or DeepL with an API key.
I really want something that just translates kanji/kana to romaji. There was an extension in Chrome that did that and it’s the only thing I miss after switching to FF.
kanji/kana to romaji
Wow, I never knew that they had a Japanese to Romaji extension. Would furigana extensions work? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/furiganaize/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search
Yeah, furiganaize has an option to display as romaji. https://files.catbox.moe/ocjic8.png
Unfortunately it only works on Kanji (which is probably the hardest part, I guess if there’s no alternative for kana there isn’t enough demand?), but thanks!
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.
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.
That makes sense, thanks.
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That’s fine for translating news articles, but maybe not for private email. Different people accept different risk levels in different situations. If you have reason to be using https then maybe you don’t want to send that data to a third party.
Gets 5 free stuff and bitches for not getting 50. Some people…
I’m sure they would be happy to accept your help in translating a new language.
Yeah this is why I still use at least 1 Google Translate extension in addition to the FF one. Need my Chinese man
Glad to see this has made it into the browser! This has been a 🇪🇺 funded project for years now!
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This was prieviously available as an addon/extension. It’s really cool they are able to do this locally, and it works well.
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).
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
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It’s great. Turns out it’s AI generated also.
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)
Very interesting points, does OCR work with PDF? Might be a possible temporary work around to run the pdf through ocr and pipe back into Firefox (maybe by running it on a local version of the .html and just directly injecting the pdf back in? Not sure, could be a fun project!
Well… I once tried to just copy the pdf into a .txt file that I then opened into firefox, but it seems to not translate .txt, thought it may be cause they are not HTML.
Yeah sadly PDF content is practically baked in like an image. If you want to learn more you can search for the breakdown of pdf structure at the infosec institute website, remember there being an article that was pretty informative. I’ll see if I can find it later today and update this
Yo can I have that picture in high resolution for my desktop wallpaper?
Go to the actual article, the image is there
Yeah, but it’s just 780x520
Reverse image search?
It says it was generated by Midjourney, so you will probably not find anything
Then AI based up resolution
Common Firefox W
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
yea, mobile is sadly always pretty behind in festures. And while I do appreciate them adding more and also good features, I’d also love to see them reworking existing ones. The autofill on mobile is a nightmare, I think even Lockwise worked better than this. It’s still uncomparable to Google’s autofill, which 99% works flawlessly even in other apps.
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.
I wish I could leave chrome, but FF can’t keep up with me. I’ve been trialing FF across multiple systems and OS’s and it’s the same across them all, around 100-150 tabs it gets unstable, uses way more RAM than Chrome and then eventually crashes
I can have literally hundreds upon hundreds of tabs in Chrome.
I get tab anxiety at about 20 at which point the least visited get scrapped.
150 tabs??? What the hell are you doing on your browser?
A lot of people seem to never use bookmarks and depend on just leaving the tabs open. shrug I guess they let their history last forever too.
when you keep a tab open, it remembers the scroll position, it’s usefull when you read a long page and leave reading in the middle and start browsing other sites. Also why would you delete history? Sites can’t read browser history.
Interesting, I found chrome to be worse with a lot of tabs open. Not much worse though, I think they are both bad. I started using OneTab with FF and it made things a lot smoother. Easy way to save specific windows with a lot of tabs until I need it again later.
Now I only use about ten active windows with 4-50 tabs each lol
Idk man lol I was testing FF to try to get off Chrome and I tested it on multiple Win10 and MacOS computers (Physical and VMs) and it was pretty much the same across
Although Chrome seems to get weird once you cross the 600 tab barrier, but having a 600 tab “limit” vs <200 is still a lot better
Maybe that’s why I sought out a program like one tab afterall
200 tabs was probably on the low end for me before I started using that extension
It’s been years now, so I may be guilty of some false memories
I use the side berry extension for FF which adds a sidebar to organize tabs into groups and adds a tree structure to the tab view as well. It also automatically unloads inactive tabs until you return to them. I have 1400 tabs open
you can do the same with firefox, you can have hundred of tabs open there as well, it has the same capability to suspend tabs.
Try Tab Suspender. With it you can open as many tabs as you care to, it will auto-suspend tabs unless you choose tabs not to suspend. This way you can open as many tabs in as many windows as you want, even suspend all the tabs in one window or many windows.
One Tab is even better, it puts all open tabs into 1 tab as a long list, then you can open those as needed in new tabs or windows.The auto tab discard extension might be useful for you
Not really, I don’t just leave old tabs open and never return to it, I actually go back to my older tabs (eventually). I jump between different projects a lot
If chrome is stable enough to handle hundreds of tabs open for weeks at a time out of the box then it is a clear winner for me, I shouldn’t have to rely on an extension just for that base functionality
Does chrome have tab groups yet? I have probably 500+ tabs open in Safari, but they’re all organized into groups so I only really see 10 or so at a time.
I just checked and it does lol I don’t even know when they rolled it out lolol
I still use Chrome when I need to Chromecast, any way around that?
This works, but it’s definitely a beta product, and not release quality…
I just use brave browser when I must do casting. It works fine, you do have to enable it though. they call it “media router” or something like that in the settings. VLC also lets you cast to chromecast so there is a protocol for non-google apps, not sure why firefox never implemented it.
Not that I’m aware of. It’s in the name right? Lol
I already know Russsian so that’s not a problem for me lol
Whelp, that would be handy lol
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!
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?
I could never find any that worked well, and the translations in chrome were too good.
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.
Why does this Firefox thumbnail go so hard tho
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.
You can disable it in the menu that opens when you click on the button at the right of the address bar
It would be nice if that worked, but it doesn’t. I found a “Settings” requester under Language -> Translations where it offers to disable translation for a list of languages, but I cannot add any.
In the annoying popup, there is a cog wheel, clicking that will show a menu. That menu have a checked checkbox, Always offer to translate, uncheck that.
Thanks, that did it.
Each time it offers to translate a page, there’s a “Never translate from [LANGUAGE]” button.
Most of the internet is not in English lol. 45% of the web is in English.
But I share your sentiment.
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