this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 173 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Us common folks may not have flying cars or jetpacks yet but this shit is pretty dope.

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[–] sir_reginald 144 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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 119 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 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

For a born again Firefox user, what decisions?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] shotgun_crab 11 points 1 year ago

Or rather removing PWA support

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[–] drmoose 95 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Only these languages though:

Bulgarian
Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
[–] MashedTech 62 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] drmoose 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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

[–] drmoose 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 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 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 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
[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

Common Firefox W

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Go to the actual article, the image is there

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[–] systemglitch 24 points 1 year ago (21 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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[–] hiramfromthechi 20 points 1 year ago

Why does this Firefox thumbnail go so hard tho

[–] shotgun_crab 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's a sick firefox fanart or whatever

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[–] Treczoks 18 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] slaacaa 12 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 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

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