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

    • TheFrirish@jlai.lu
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      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
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        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.

        • TheFrirish@jlai.lu
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          1 year ago

          I totally understand you that’s the reason I was using Firefox also. but after discovering that their main revenue is from Google and that firefox is basically kept alive BY Google just so they can say that it looks like their supporting different browsers is a big no. Performance and display problems on my phone were really annoying (I was using Mull on my phone and firefox on desktop).

          • Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You’re so close but you’re still missing the point. Google gives money to Firefox to make it the default search, that’s it. Google has zero say what Firefox does besides it being the default search engine. Google does the same thing with Apple’s Safari, they give Apple literally over a Billion dollars just to be the default search, so would Apple be bad then too? If I can encourage you Just to use Firefox and try not to make excuses for staying with Google’s browsers just because Firefox isn’t absolutely perfect.

            • TheFrirish@jlai.lu
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              1 year ago

              You’re also missing the point. Google gives firefox around 85% of it’s revenue. We are really fighting an uphill battle against against corporations that have even bribed our allies. I don’t want to argue because at this point it’s pointless I don’t want to be pitted against people who support FOSS because that’s what I want to use and that’s what I use most of time. But when it comes to browsers we have lost that battle.

              Unless we find 800 million dollars in donations, Mozilla is just the pet dog of google at this point.

              • Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                My dude you’re not here to convince me, you’re here to try convince yourself you’ve already resigned. Stop making excuses and just use Firefox. Over and out, cheers!

  • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Only these languages though:

    Bulgarian
    Dutch
    English
    French
    German
    Italian
    Polish
    Portuguese
    Spanish
    
      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        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
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          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.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        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
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          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.

      • beesyrup@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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      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
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        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.

      • Gamey@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Because you would always send the pages of the website you visit to a third party, that’s information noone should know!

      • brianorca@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m sure they would be happy to accept your help in translating a new language.

      • King@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Gets 5 free stuff and bitches for not getting 50. Some people…

    • Resonosity@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Yeah this is why I still use at least 1 Google Translate extension in addition to the FF one. Need my Chinese man

  • jman6495@lemmy.ml
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    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
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    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.

    • scala@lemmy.ml
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      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
  • Marius@lemmy.mariusdavid.fr
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    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)
    • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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!

      • Marius@lemmy.mariusdavid.fr
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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

  • wesley@yall.theatl.social
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    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

    • moodymud@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • ColdWater@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

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

  • systemglitch@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • quantum_mechanic@sh.itjust.works
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    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
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      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?

    • swellow the sun@mander.xyz
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      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.

    • letsgocrazy@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    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.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • snaggen@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • sznio@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Each time it offers to translate a page, there’s a “Never translate from [LANGUAGE]” button.

    • El Barto@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Most of the internet is not in English lol. 45% of the web is in English.

      But I share your sentiment.