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

  • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

      • King@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

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

      • 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.

  • 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!

    • 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
  • 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?

    • 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.

  • 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.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • red@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • debil@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I get tab anxiety at about 20 at which point the least visited get scrapped.

        • cm0002@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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

          • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Does chrome have tab groups yet? I have probably 500+ tabs open in Safari, but they’re all organized into groups so I only really see 10 or so at a time.

            • cm0002@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I just checked and it does lol I don’t even know when they rolled it out lolol

      • systemglitch@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

        • cm0002@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Idk man lol I was testing FF to try to get off Chrome and I tested it on multiple Win10 and MacOS computers (Physical and VMs) and it was pretty much the same across

          Although Chrome seems to get weird once you cross the 600 tab barrier, but having a 600 tab “limit” vs <200 is still a lot better

          • systemglitch@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Maybe that’s why I sought out a program like one tab afterall

            200 tabs was probably on the low end for me before I started using that extension

            It’s been years now, so I may be guilty of some false memories

      • lemme_at_it@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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 all the tabs 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.

      • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • BrightCandle@lemmy.world
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    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.

  • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • Bwaz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • LCP@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It has online translation if you sign up for Sync Ultra. I believe it uses Google Translate.