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
Us common folks may not have flying cars or jetpacks yet but this shit is pretty dope.
that’s really good news even though I don’t use firefox anymore (sorry vivaldi user) I’m glad firefox is actually improving.
What?
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
No *full pwa support
no support
I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.
deleted by creator
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…
deleted by creator
Firefox Android used to have an actual tabs bar? Interesting
deleted by creator
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.
Yeah this is why I still use at least 1 Google Translate extension in addition to the FF one. Need my Chinese man
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 amazing and I hope Chinese and Japanese comes soon. Thank you Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-translations/
Glad to see this has made it into the browser! This has been a 🇪🇺 funded project for years now!
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
deleted by creator
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.
Common Firefox W
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
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
Why does this Firefox thumbnail go so hard tho
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 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.
I already know Russsian so that’s not a problem for me lol
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
