The browser is getting its own privacy-oriented translation

May 31, 2021 06:25 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla Firefox is still considered by many the only alternative to the avalanche of Chromium browsers, so all the improvements the parent company makes to the app are pretty important for the community of users out there.

And this time, Mozilla is making a change that would make it easier for Firefox users to translate content they find online.

It’s all thanks to the Firefox Translations add-on being integrated directly into Firefox browser, with a recent report from GHacks revealing that the change has already been implemented in the Nightly build of Firefox.

What’s Firefox Translations? This extension is pretty much Mozilla’s response to Google Translate, therefore providing Firefox users with an easy way to translate content on web pages. But as compared to Google’s, Mozilla’s solution is fully focused on privacy, as the translation is performed locally, with no content exposed to a cloud service.

Still not enabled by default though

Worth knowing, however, is that this update is progressing slowly, as Mozilla clearly wants to make sure everything is running correctly.

So right now, while Firefox Translations is already bundled with the Nightly build of the browser, the extension still isn’t enabled by default, which means users who want to activate the translation service must do the whole thing manually.

That’s pretty fine anyway, as the whole thing doesn’t take more than a few seconds. Just launch the Firefox experimental flag screen and search for:

extensions.translations.disabled Double-click the entry to switch it to FALSE and then restart the browser to save the changes. Firefox Translations should now be enabled, and you can check if the whole thing worked correctly by heading over to the add-ons UI and see if it shows up in the list.

Mozilla hasn’t provided any ETA as to when this new feature could go live in the stable version of Firefox.