Mozilla Releases Local Machine Translation Tools (mozilla.org) 33
Longtime Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov writes: "In January of 2019, Mozilla joined the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, University of Sheffield and University of Tartu as part of a project funded by the European Union called Project Bergamot," writes Mozilla Speech and AI engineer Andre Natal in a blog post. "The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user's computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private..."
The result of this work is the translations add-on that is now available in the Firefox Add-On store for installation on Firefox Nightly, Beta and in General Release. It currently supports 14 languages. You can test the translation engine without installing the add-on.
The result of this work is the translations add-on that is now available in the Firefox Add-On store for installation on Firefox Nightly, Beta and in General Release. It currently supports 14 languages. You can test the translation engine without installing the add-on.
this and dark mode (Score:1)
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Re: this and dark mode (Score:1)
Re: Moj poduszkowca (Score:2)
Hovercraft (Score:2)
My nipples explode in delight!
No translate selection? (Score:3)
Apparently it only translates full pages, that's a bit of a bummer.
Still, this is actually potentially useful, and it is an extension instead of being built in, so congrats to the firefox team for doing things the right way for a change.
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Someone above is complaining that some features are not built-in... No matter what Mozilla does, Slashdot will pitch a fit about it.
If they add popular features as addons, someone will complain that they have to go hunting for basic functionality that should be built in. If they build a feature in, someone will complain that they're bloating the browser. If they make an addon and include it by default, they'll moan about needing to remove a bunch of crap every time they install.
The worst part is that it's
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If they add popular features as addons, someone will complain that they have to go hunting for basic functionality that should be built in. If they build a feature in, someone will complain that they're bloating the browser. If they make an addon and include it by default, they'll moan about needing to remove a bunch of crap every time they install.
I only complain about two things in this regard. One, if something which should be an extension is built in. Two, if my settings are not respected. It should be trivial to not shit on my settings, and if it isn't, it should be and they are fucking up. Every time I install a new Firefox I have to disable Pocket again. It's clearly being done intentionally.
You can avoid people complaining about having to disable bundled extensions by simply not enabling them on the initial install, and not enabling them on up
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Every time I install a new Firefox I have to disable Pocket again. It's clearly being done intentionally.
That would be awful, but they're not actually doing that. I was able to find a few complaints about about pocket being re-enabled after an update, but it was always followed by replies that said something to the effect of "this didn't happen to me" or "I couldn't reproduce that". If this is happening to you consistently, I'd first try refreshing FireFox [mozilla.org]. If that doesn't work, I'd file a bug report.
So if e.g. Pocket were an extension, they would absolutely and positively re-enable it on every single install no matter your preferences.
The evidence suggests otherwise. The issue you've described does not appear to be policy, but a bug that h
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I was able to find a few complaints about about pocket being re-enabled after an update, but it was always followed by replies that said something to the effect of "this didn't happen to me" or "I couldn't reproduce that". If this is happening to you consistently, I'd first try refreshing FireFox. If that doesn't work, I'd file a bug report.
I gave up on bug reports for Firefox.
I really don't understand the hate for pocket. [...] For the people who don't want it, it's pretty easy to disable. It also stays disabled. At least, for the overwhelming majority of users who have elected to disable it.
If I were one of those, I'd probably dislike it less. It does not however belong in the browser, it belongs in an extension, period.
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Again, there are solutions to your problem [mozilla.org], which appear to be related to your antique profile. It'll take a few minutes, but it's better than spending years frustrated.
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It's not an antique profile, I've refreshed it already within the period of modern firefox.
It would be nice if the refresh feature would reinstall my extensions. It would be even nicer if Firefox could do basic sanity checking to detect broken profiles. But that seems to be another thing they can't manage. I guess it's too complicated for them to maintain.
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This, folks, is what I mean. Some people just want to complain.
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Sadly big reports are mostly ignored as far as I can tell. I tried to get things fixed but they just aren't interested.
If the code base was easier to work with I'd fix it myself, but it's in a bit of a state.
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I just moved my homedir to a new Ubuntu install, and once I removed all that snap bullshit I loaded up my profile, and pocket had enabled itself again. And now that I've disabled it, it will continue to be disabled... likely until the next update.
It literally happens to me every time I load my same old profile in a new version of Firefox.
Fuck Pocket, and fuck spending $20M on it.
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It literally happens to me every time I load my same old profile
You're in luck. The solution I shared should take care of your problem.
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What's really fucked up is they did the same in reverse with translation extensions. There used to be actual competition with multiple add-ons striving to provide the best features for in-place translation. Then one day Mozilla arbitrarily started hard-banning all of them, to the point they not only wouldn't allow them in the store they would literally disable and uninstall users' own privately downloaded and installed extensions.
Mozilla went so far as to decide that you the user weren't allowed to have tra
A step in the right direction (Score:3)
I hope they add Japanese support soon!
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I do.
Finally! (Score:2)
It's about time they stopped making machine translation dependent on someone else's computer.
Re: Finally! (Score:1)
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For sure. I was worried that the era of doing things locally was over. I'm glad to see it's making a comeback. Now we need a return to local speech recognition.
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Given that there have been serious advancements in computational speed, parallel processing, and voice modelling in the last 20 years, I would say we are a LOT closer.
Oh my goodness (Score:2)
Something not Firefox/Thunderbird that I'm actually interesting in from Mozilla (and doesn't seem like a complete waste of money).
Nice! (Score:1)
And this is why they hard-banned every other addon (Score:1)
They didn't want any competition for their in-house extension. It's completely fucked up that Mozilla went to the lengths of not only hard-banning every attempt at an in-place translation extension from their official page, but actively sabotaged users' computers to block and even remove extensions they had chosen to install by hand through a locally downloaded file.