Firefox 117 Available With Local Automated Translation Support

[treba]

Unless you have something to hide, I genuinely don't understand why people care so much. If you do have something to hide then shame on you: I hope you get caught.

Well, history showed that political environments can change. You may find yourself in an environment where you suddenly *need* to hide something, potentially for very good reasons. At which point you might be happy if technical infrastructure is build in a way so it can not be easily abused.

In the 1930s the Dutch kept records of religious affinity of their citizens. The Dutch government didn't abuse that info. But suddenly the Germans where in charge. Good for you if you believe that stuff like this can never happen again - but maybe imagine what some governments are ready to do to stop women to get an abortion, or what happens in states like China.

[schmidtbag]

The answer is EU funded development. So yes privacy was a key part of the design because of "European Union’s Horizon 2020" funding requirements with Privacy. It does not take much thinking to work out how online translation is bad.

Bad in the context of the EU, privacy, or both? Because I imagine using Google Translate to make a page legible is the least of people's privacy woes. GT is mediocre, and that matters because Google wants to collect your data because they want to know how to best target you for advertisements. If the translations aren't accurate enough, that can screw with their algorithm.

For what it's worth: if you are signed into anything that is tied to Google or are visiting a site that is funded using Google ads, it doesn't matter if you're using FF with local translation: they're still tracking you. And if it's not them, it's someone else who isn't really any better than them. Sometimes it's the little wins that make a difference, but in this context, the difference is almost completely negated for most of the western world. Sure, maybe those who wear tinfoil hats are practically invisible to companies like Google or Amazon, but as I've always said: you're invisible to them even if you use every service they provide. You're not special. They don't actually care about what you search or do, they don't know you personally, and your livelihood isn't threatened: they just want to target you with ads you may find relevant; you're nothing more than just a source of cash to them. Unless you have something to hide, I genuinely don't understand why people care so much. If you do have something to hide then shame on you: I hope you get caught.

The only way to live a private life on the internet is if you use a library PC in a town you don't live in and don't sign into any accounts. Otherwise, if someone wants to track you down, they can.

[Citan]

Profiles make more sense to me.

Separate browser windows launched in separate browser processes with appearances determined by separate profiles makes it trivial to distinguish between browser windows doing different things.

I've been a looooong time following that approach too.
And I still use it technically, to keep entirely separate "work" from "personal".

But when for example you need to use several environments of the same infrastructure at the same time it's invaluable in UX to be able to have the tabs close-by instead of needing to alt-tab to another window (in terms of losing mind-focus keeping as much as possible "static" really helps).

And with a bit of tweaking (of course not something for the regular end-user) with Chrome.css you can really make each "container profile" very distinct at least on tab titles.
So you can really mix the two approaches to whatever degree suits *your* personal way of working, and that is extremely beneficial imo.

[billyswong]

That's cool, but I want to be assured that my browsing footprint is untouchable when someone else is using my PC. So, its not the same feature.

For such case, I would rather give that someone else a guest account in OS level. If I worry about browsing footprint and I cannot stand by his/her shoulder to watch out what one is using the computer for, Chrome profile will not be enough.

[salvaju29ro]

"easy" to use is in the eye of the beholder. I find Firefox easy to use, but it's my "go to" browser 99% of the time and has been forever. I don't find Chromium "hard" to use either though. I just prefer Firefox.

As far as reliable, I've never had real problems with it. It sometimes crashes on me randomly in Arch, but seems stable / no issues in Tumbleweed and normally the Arch issues iron themselves out due to libraries being updated. It's not always a Firefox problem.

I understand what you mean, but I wasn't referring to Firefox itself. I've always found it to be a great browser. I was referring exclusively to the function of translation, which is essential for me who are not English speakers and who often find themselves reading sites in English

[mirmirmir]

you have. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...nt-containers/

That's cool, but I want to be assured that my browsing footprint is untouchable when someone else is using my PC. So, its not the same feature.

[oiaohm]

I've always appreciated this feature in Chrome, so it's good to see Firefox has it. I have to wonder though if the local/offline translation wasn't really because of privacy, but rather, not having the right (or desire) to integrate with a 3rd party web service. Reminds me of cars that use thin plastics or remove features for the sake of "weight savings" when it's really more about cost savings.

https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations

The answer is EU funded development. So yes privacy was a key part of the design because of "European Union’s Horizon 2020" funding requirements with Privacy. It does not take much thinking to work out how online translation is bad.

Do note EU funded development so European languages only on the roadmap. Non European language support is not even planed for.

[Sonadow]

It's actually Chrome that lacks the alt container feature, one of the biggest shortcomings I face when forced to use Brave due to poor Firefox performance.

Profiles make more sense to me.

Separate browser windows launched in separate browser processes with appearances determined by separate profiles makes it trivial to distinguish between browser windows doing different things.

[Nozo]

I saw my colleague using profile feature on chrome. I kinda surprised when i found we don't have that feature in ff.

It's actually Chrome that lacks the alt container feature, one of the biggest shortcomings I face when forced to use Brave due to poor Firefox performance.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I think its nice that local translations are now supported. unfortunately Japanese is not supported
DeepL is nice but they cut some sentences like GT is doing. LLMs are worse in that regard and in the end i sit here with a dictionary and do it word for word myself.

Wow, I saw this article and got really excited, then saw this post and got really disappointed. Not needing to use Chrome would have been great.

I wonder if this truncation is why I've noticed a marked decrease in quality of translation from both Google Translate and DeepL recently?

I guess local translations for ideogrammic languages is too complicated for local translation?

Hopefully in the future.