Perhaps given that the majority of people use Chrome or some Chromium derivative, this news might not be hugely exciting, but for the health of the internet it’s so important to have viable alternatives, especially when they’re run by a non-profit organisation.
I will admit that I left Firefox for a while about 10 years ago when it was lagging behind Chrome in features and functionality, but I came back to it nearly as my exclusive browser about 4 years ago when I started to disconnect myself from Google’s clutches.
However there was one area which was restricting me from using Firefox 100% of the time, and quite an important area given I live in Germany and am quite far from fluent in German 😁😅
Automated and inline web page translation is just so important for me to go about day-to-day life without a lot of extra confusion and hassle. For a long time Chrome (and Edge, but that’s even worse than Chrome) were the only browsers where you could get reliable native inline translation.
Then Vivaldi announced they were bringing inline translation with privacy features (anonymised translations) which was great news and led me to have Vivaldi primarily for browsing German websites.
However Firefox have gone one further and don’t send the webpage text anywhere, so it’s completely private.
Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine.
You can read the details on the project here: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/local-translation-add-on-project-bergamot/
A huge congratulations to the Firefox team for bringing this excellent feature to life.
Why not test out Firefox today. Seriously, it’s time to take back some control from Google and Microsoft and have more of a say in how your data and privacy are handled.
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