Finally, Firefox can now translate Web Pages without need to install additional extensions. The native translation feature is built-into Firefox and available out of the box with Firefox 115 on wards in pre-release versions.
Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge use Google Translate and Microsoft Translate Cloud services to translate pages.The pages should be sent to Google and Microsoft servers for the translation to happen.
Firefox can now translate text locally without needing to send data outside of user’s machine.
This took sometime for Mozilla.
With funding from European union, Mozilla started testing Translation service in 2019. The company made the translation add-ons available on AMO to test feature
Installing the extension is no longer required now.
Hands-on Native Page Translation in Firefox
- Open Firefox
- Navigate to any webpage in language other than default language set in browser settings.
- Look for translate icon that appears in address bar and click on it
- Click on “Translate” button, the page will be translated
- Additionally, you can click on the translate icon and choose the option to automatically translate pages in that particular language by selecting the desired option from the gear icon
If for some reason, the translate button doesn’t appear, translation doesn’t happen, check the following
- visit about:config
- Ensure “browser.
translations. enable” pref value is set to true.
Bonus: For those who prefer a truly automated translation experience, Firefox offers an additional preference. By flipping the “browser.translations.autoTranslate” preference in “about:config” to true, you can enable Firefox to automatically translate pages in different languages without the need for manual intervention.
Firefox Translation Settings
You can find Firefox Translations Settings by visiting Settings > General >Language >Translations.
Firefox allows to download language packs for different languages for Offline translation on your machine.
What’s your take on this? Let us know in the comments below.
Final words: Mozilla enables Page Translation feature in Firefox 115 per-release version by default. Firefox does the translation locally without need to rely on cloud services.
More on Firefox:
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Firefox 113 is out w/ improved Picture in Picture Mode and Animated AV1 Image Support
Remains to be seen the quality of the translations. I’m skeptical. Translation servers (DeepL, Google, Bing, Yandex) must hold megabytes of code and data to bring a decent result. I really wonder how Firefox 115 will manage all that locally. Wait and see.
Connection-free translations is great… if the quality is of the ride. Wait and see but I doubt the rendering will be that of DeepL and even that of Google Translation, the latter being accessible via a 3rd-party proxy such as SimplyTranslate if privacy is imperative (and it is here).