2y ago

Firefox 118 Enters Beta Testing with the Built-In Translation Feature for Websites

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Firefox 118 Enters Beta Testing with the Built-In Translation Feature for Websites - 9to5Linux

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petsoi @discuss.tchncs.de

2y ago

Firefox 118 Enters Beta Testing with the Built-In Translation Feature for Websites

9to5linux.com /firefox-118-enters-beta-testing-with-the-built-in-translation-feature-for-websites

16 comments

The translation feature is based on the Bergamot project to provide users with a privacy-aware translation engine where the translation is done locally using machine learning, it’s never sent to a third party, and it’s optimized for consumer hardware.
Neat!
- Yeah, wow, this is really great if it's accurate enough.
  
  You can try it on desktop using the Firefox Translations addon which is likely what they'll use.
- I just showed someone last week how to use the Google translate site for this purpose, and noted how it's not really private.
  Going to forward this to them
Definitely a feature I’ve missed from chrome, going to enjoy not having to rely on janky extensions
They have a Firefox translations extension which is pretty good and entirely client side. Unfortunately it didn't support many languages and didn't support Chinese or Japanese so it was a deal breaker for me.
FYI, the translation feature is available in the current stable version (v117), but it's disabled by default. To enable it, go to about:config and set browser.translations.enable to true. I tried it earlier on a German website and it worked well.
Reference: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/27/how-to-enable-firefoxs-native-translate-feature-in-firefox-117/
This is cool, but beyond anything I wish the linux version of firefox used my default filepicker. It keeps choosing to use the gtk file picker instead of thunar or whatever else I choose.
- It can already do that as long as your desktop environment uses portals. You just need to set the appropriate about:config flag or envvar.
  
  TIL Firefox could use the updated GNOME File Picker with thumbnails. Just set widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker to 1 instead of 2.
  For KDE.
- I don't think that's possible. You can switch between gtk and kde file pickers though.
fucking finally we used to have this is xul extensions ffs
- We already have it as a non-XUL extension, so I don't see what your issue with it is? Just that it is not built it?
  https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-translations/
  You can already install the extension and use it today. Also AFAIK the XUL extension was not local only translation
  
  that extension very worked as well as the ones we used to have
- Local translation was never available in xul extensions. What are you referring to?
Nice. That is definitely a feature that Firefox currently lacks compared to Chromium (I don't use actual Chrome much).

16 comments