The Firefox browser now has a built-in page translator that works even without the Internet

Us common folks may not have flying cars or jetpacks yet but this shit is pretty dope.

What?
that's really good news even though I don't use firefox anymore (sorry vivaldi user) I'm glad firefox is actually improving.
- 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.

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
- 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
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
    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.
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- I'm sure they would be happy to accept your help in translating a new language.
- Gets 5 free stuff and bitches for not getting 50. Some people...
Yeah this is why I still use at least 1 Google Translate extension in addition to the FF one. Need my Chinese man

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
Spanish
Estonian
English
German
Czech
Bulgarian
Portuguese
Italian
French
Polish
Development
Russian
Persian (Farsi)
Icelandic
Norwegian Nynorsk
Norwegian Bokmål
Ukrainian
Dutch

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.

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

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.

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

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...
  Add Chromecast support to Firefox with Fx_cast extension
- Not that I'm aware of. It's in the name right? Lol
- 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
- Whelp, that would be handy 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?
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- The auto tab discard extension might be useful for you

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.

Why does this Firefox thumbnail go so hard tho

That's a sick firefox fanart or whatever

It reminds me of the internet of early 2000s
- I hope companies abandon this uggly minimalist trend soon. Modern style in general is just soulless and empty. I can look at a building from the 18th Century and say "damn that looks good" but anything made in the last decades is just generic garbage that is forgotten after 2 minutes. There is no identity anywhere anymore, everything is reduced down to the minimum needed and it sucks imo.
AI generated :/

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.

You can disable it in the menu that opens when you click on the button at the right of the address bar
- 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.
Each time it offers to translate a page, there's a "Never translate from [LANGUAGE]" button.
Most of the internet is not in English lol. 45% of the web is in English.
But I share your sentiment.

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 just realized FF didn't have a built in translator a week ago. Excited to see it come!

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.

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

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.
- I've started blocking communities h that operate in specific languages I don't know. Im recent memory, a Spanish instance opened and my feed got flooded with posts in Spanish, so I went and blocked these communities not out of ill will but because their posts are meaningless to me except for the odd guessing game what words might mean.
  A reliable, integrated translation feature would open a new world of content for me there (though I'm not sure it could translate Spanish memes, unless it supports OCR, and Spanish news are probably of little interest to me)
- It has online translation if you sign up for Sync Ultra. I believe it uses Google Translate.
- Sync app offers translation but only for the paid version and you have to manually choose to translate

It has multiple translation providers to choose from, but only shows the logo and not a name. I have no idea what the logos are except google translate

If you want to dig into it, I believe this is the core project for the translations.
I’m willing to bet you could work something out to make it work
Otherwise there’s always selenium which I imagine would include functionality to do the page translations.
+1 for interest!
If not natively, I bet you could work something out with headless mode, perhaps.

How will this offline translator affect Firefox's memory usage? The article mentioned that it currently only supports 9 languages. If I choose a source language will it be able to translate to all other 8 languages? Why didn't they use existing open-source software like Apertium (or did they?)?

tried it, sadly it seems to rarely actually pop up, most sites I tried just didnt do anything

For me it's popping up all the time and although I guess I understand why they did it, I absolutely hate it. I don't want translations since I speak the different languages of the sites I visit fluently. Getting popups because I speak different languages is intrusive.
- i wish they had some kind of hotkey for it instead.
- I'm sure there's a way to disable it, even if you have to go into about:config

But they killed the fox in their new logo :(

I have custom CSS for my FF to display an old logo in the title bar
Do you have a source for that? I can't find anything.
- well if you look at the logo revisions. the fox and world slowly disappeared

I've installed the add-on manually a few weeks ago and it works surprisingly well. It's now my go-to translation tool for websites.

I'm sure there's some use cases out there, but that kind of sounds dumb at first. You can use a built-in page translator that translates web pages... without the internet. How are you getting to these pages in the first place then? I'm assuming the appeal is more from the privacy aspect, because it's not communicating with anyone else to get those translations?

I’m sure the privacy minded people like it. As opposed to a translating service knowing all the webpages you’re reading.
- "Works offline" doesn't necessarily mean it never goes online.
You can open local html documents in your browser. They don't need to be downloaded from the internet. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as for CLI tools that produce HTML to visualize data.
I think the point isn't that you wouldn't be connected to the internet, rather that the translator itself isn't yet another thing that will phone home with all of your data
It's, for example, quite important for folks handling internal documents in a company. You get those documents served via the company's intranet, so not publicly accessible. And if you click that translate-button with other translators, that internal document is published into the internet, which is a breach of confidentiality, or even a breach of contract, if you're handling supplier documents.
If your company is big enough, it may have a self-hosted translation service that you can use, but for everyone else, foreign language documents were a bit of a problem so far.
It's much faster for one. Google Translate is super slow compared to this and it sometimes refuses to work if the Google overlords think you might be a bot or something.

Firefox rocks! (And subsequent forks of it)

Got Firefox 118 and the very first website I tested it on failed. Does not translate Russian. Seriously? smh, hope they add more languages in the near future because other browsers have had this feature for years.

I've been disappointed with Orion and Safari lately. Not ready to switch to Chrome, but maybe it's time to give Firefox another shot.

That logo is a lot better than their current one.

That not a logo, that's a thumbnail of a large graphic asset. It does not follow any logo design principals and professional designers wouldn't consider it a logo at all. It's cool graphic though.
The AI image has such a cool fur pattern tbh.

@L4s Really nice!

I had to search for it quite a bit to find it. It's in the (stupid IMO) menu with the three lines, they made to replace the proper menu bar.

If it detects another language on a website, it shows up on the URL bar
- Thanks, actually popped up automatically, maybe a first time thing IDK.
  It doesn't detect language as far as I can tell, it seems it just uses the domain name.

I tried to translate a page from German to Bulgarian. It's broken

Someone link to a page that this will work on.

They demo this with their own homepage mozilla.org after you've updated. I thought it worked great.
- I updated through my distribution's repository and I don't see anything translatable on mozilla.org.

Last time I checked online translators were as shit as 10 years, so I wonder how well this works.

Haha oh wow
Well then you should check out:
Translate.google.com
And
DeepL
- Do people actually rate Google Translate that well? I've always found it lacking, but then I don't use it anywhere near habitually.
- Yeah, they may look fine for people who don't know language other than their own, otherwise you will just notice that they just translate badly and sometimes even mistranslating (or not translating at all) key words. This is especially true for anything that is not a simple conversation between people, or other simple sentences.
  It is also not helpful due how they work - while translating from English or to English may be working occasionally well, using any other language combination such as Polish -> Russian works terrible even though they are more similar to each other than let's say Polish -> English. "Why?" you may ask. It's all because it is always translating first to English and then to target language, and that's a guarantee to shitty translation, but somebody with no knowledge of either basic linguistics or at least intermediate level of foreign language may not be able to comprehend why is that a hard/impossible task.
  To put it simply - For any more complicated text you are always sacrificing some context in translation, or make it more ambiguous. If you do it twice you are just making shit up.

It's really neat IMO. It should've been there earlier

Sure. We should have had smart phones in the 80s.
And electric cars too.

But you can visit websites offline, you can self-host but then you already use a language that you understand.

I'd rather not send the pages I visit to Google's or Deepl's servers. This keeps translation local, which is an awesome feature.
I guess the offline it's mostly to advertise privacy. Or maybe can it translate pdf documents?
Not necessarily. A lot of great open source web based projects are written in languages that I sure as heck do not understand. This is a great feature for all those cases, as well as the other cases of offlined content.
More importantly, the reason this is being highlighted is because it means your website data isn’t going anywhere off your computer to be translated.
- I don't think it translates Nerd to Common

I have 120 and do not have it. Weird that it's only enabled on an older version.