this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024

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242

Firefox Getting Translate Selected Text Feature, Here's How to Try It (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There was doom and gloom about Mozilla saying they wanted to integrate 'AI' into Firexox, but to me, privacy respecting locally run translation seems like a great usecase. I guess people were only reading the headline and jumped to the conclusion Mozilla wanted a chatbot.

Features like this, better text to speech, audio descriptions for images, maybe something to find alternate sources covering the same news, spotting fake reviews, etc all seem like worthwhile developments.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They have been working on the local translation stuff since 2019, long before they started talking about AI recently

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

True, but a lot of stuff that's now called 'AI' wouldn't have been branded as such a few years ago. A lot of the 'AI' we're seeing now isn't actually new tech.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Huh, what do you mean with it's getting that? I already have that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Do you have Beta, Nightly or Developer?

[–] fuzzy_feeling 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

yes

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Fuzzy feeling? More like fuzzy logic! Am I right guys? Guys? Gotta go...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Then Firefox was still in the process of getting it.

[+] [email protected] -72 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Playing catch-up with Chrome again?

[–] [email protected] 102 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Does Chrome's run locally on the machine, or does it ferry it over to Google Translate?

Firefox's is done locally, it is not cloud based.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 7 months ago

Also, I think it was already possible to use Google Translate and others through the extensions. This is an improvement because it's done locally

[+] [email protected] -26 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Is there confirmation that it's done locally? That would require a quite big download, especially if multiple languages are in it. Also if local, it should be easier to translate large documents instead of emphasizing snippets. One always has to be suspicious of Mozilla these days.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 7 months ago

One always has to be suspicious of Mozilla these days.

As far as I know Mozilla never lied on technical details, at worst they didn't know about wrongdoings by their partners and acted once known about.

The translation being done locally is advertised and should be simple to check with it being open-source. It also has to download for a while on first use, as well as translations take a considerable amount of time depending on the hardware. E.g. for larger sites it takes a short while until the last paragraph shows up as translated.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 7 months ago

It uses the Marian library via WASM (their wrapper for this is here) to do translations, which AFAICT is "AI" based (which I presume knocks the file size down quite a bit) - additionally, the language packs (I'm not sure what term to use here so I'll just go with that) are not all bundled with Firefox, they're downloaded when you first use them.

The previous incarnation of it, the Firefox extension's repo was found over here - I assume the code is now within Firefox's main repo since its built into Firefox now.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

I think the way to know is to unplug the PC from internet and see if Firefox can translate stuff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Only their word until someone does it with a sniffer. E: I suppose, or looks the source but someone answered better now.

Note: Unlike other browsers that rely on cloud services, Firefox keeps your data safe on your device. There's no privacy risk of sending text to third parties for analysis because translation happens on your device, not externally.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation

[–] pipe01 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Or just try it with no internet

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Assuming it's not cached and sent next time it talks, of course.