Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to 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
As a long term Firefox user, I’ve been disappointed with Mozilla’s decision’s 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.
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 Spanish
Still 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.
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:
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.
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.
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 not 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.
Because you would always send the pages of the website you visit to a third party, that’s information noone should know!
I’m sure they would be happy to accept your help in translating a new language.
Gets 5 free stuff and bitches for not getting 50. Some people…
That’s fine for translating news articles, but maybe not for private email. Different people accept different risk levels in different situations.
Yeah this is why I still use at least 1 Google Translate extension in addition to the FF one. Need my Chinese man
It’s amazing and I hope Chinese and Japanese comes soon. Thank you Firefox.
This was prieviously available as an addon/extension. It’s really cool they are able to do this locally, and it works well.
It’s great. Turns out it’s AI generated also.
For anyone interested in the tech behind that, it’s based on Project Bergamot: browser.mt (now you don’t need the extension anymore).
I’ve been using for a few months. Here is my opinion:
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.
Common Firefox W
Yo can I have that picture in high resolution for my desktop wallpaper?
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?
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
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 tabs all the 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
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 to do casting. It works fine, you do have to enable it though. they call it “media router” or somethinglike that in the settings.
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.
There are so many translator plugins for Firefox.
I’ve been living in a foreign country for 8 years and Firefox has been a godsend.
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.
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.
Going to accelerate now that AIs can translate every article into 16 different languages. Gotta get those metrics ups.
That’s a sick firefox fanart or whatever
It reminds me of the internet of early 2000s
I hope companies abandon this uggly minimalist trend soon. Modern style in general is just soulless and empty. I can look at a building from the 18th Century and say “damn that looks good” but anything made in the last decades is just generic garbage that is forgotten after 2 minutes. There is no identity anywhere anymore, everything is reduced down to the minimum needed and it sucks imo.
AI generated :/
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.
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?
I just realized FF didn’t have a built in translator a week ago. Excited to see it come!
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
Would be great to have that on Lemmy Sync app, too! After browsing a while, a large proportion of posts start being in languages I dont understand.
I’m sure there’s some use cases out there, but that kind of sounds dumb at first. You can use a built-in page translator that translates web pages… without the internet. How are you getting to these pages in the first place then?
I’m sure the privacy minded people like it. As opposed to a translating service knowing all the webpages you’re reading.
You can open local html documents in your browser. They don’t need to be downloaded from the internet. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as for CLI tools that produce HTML to visualize data.
I think the point isn’t that you wouldn’t be connected to the internet, rather that the translator itself isn’t yet another thing that will phone home with all of your data
It’s, for example, quite important for folks handling internal documents in a company. You get those documents served via the company’s intranet, so not publicly accessible. And if you click that translate-button with other translators, that internal document is published into the internet, which is a breach of confidentiality, or even a breach of contract, if you’re handling supplier documents.
If your company is big enough, it may have a self-hosted translation service that you can use, but for everyone else, foreign language documents were a bit of a problem so far.
It’s much faster for one. Google Translate is super slow compared to this and it sometimes refuses to work if the Google overlords think you might be a bot or something.
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
tried it, sadly it seems to rarely actually pop up, most sites I tried just didnt do anything
That logo is a lot better than their current one.
Can one use that translation tool from command line?
Got Firefox 118 and the very first website I tested it on failed. Does not translate Russian. Seriously? smh, hope they add more languages in the near future because other browsers have had this feature for years.
I’ve installed the add-on manually a few weeks ago and it works surprisingly well. It’s now my go-to translation tool for websites.
It’s really neat IMO. It should’ve been there earlier
But you can visit websites offline, you can self-host but then you already use a language that you understand.
Firefox rocks! (And subsequent forks of it)
FUCKRedditMods@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Us common folks may not have flying cars or jetpacks yet but this shit is pretty dope.
TheFrirish@jlai.lu 1 year ago
that’s really good news even though I don’t use firefox anymore (sorry vivaldi user) I’m glad firefox is actually improving.
Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] 1 year ago
Nothing against Vivaldi, used it a lot since it’s release, but found my way back to Firefox last year since I just couldn’t stand giving Google anymore power over the web market. The less I give Google, the better I feel, but also the better off the web will be. Once again as a company Vivaldi does a fantastic job and their stances on privacy are admirable, but I just can’t support Chromium these days.
synceDD@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What?