This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Us common folks may not have flying cars or jetpacks yet but this shit is pretty dope.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
Glad to see this has made it into the browser! This has been a 🇪🇺 funded project for years now!
This was prieviously available as an addon/extension. It's really cool they are able to do this locally, and it works well.
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
Development
I’ve been using for a few months. Here is my opinion:
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
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.
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?
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.
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 quickly tried yesterday and I could do it seamlessly, it worked very well. If you go to the preferences there's a option to download the languages in parts of 100-200MB/each.
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.
I just realized FF didn't have a built in translator a week ago. Excited to see it come!