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.

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.

Only these languages though:

Bulgarian
Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish

Glad to see this has made it into the browser! This has been a 🇪🇺 funded project for years now!

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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).

Can we talk about how cool that firefox picture is though?

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)

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

Common Firefox W

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

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!

Why does this Firefox thumbnail go so hard tho

That's a sick firefox fanart or whatever

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 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

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

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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

But they killed the fox in their new logo :(

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?

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.

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

That logo is a lot better than their current one.

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.

@L4s Really nice!

Someone link to a page that this will work on.

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

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

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

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