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Comment by jeremiahlee | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this explains why Mozilla unexpectedly remotely disabled Page Translator add-on yesterday after previously permitting it to be distributed as a side-load for two years. https://github.com/jeremiahlee/page-translator/issues/26

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Likely? I’m inclined to believe that there’s something wrong with your addon, rather than Firefox being anticompetitive about an extension that doesn’t compete with a feature that doesn’t exist yet.

When Mozilla rejected it from being distributed on AMO years ago because it included Google and Microsoft translation libraries externally, they said it could be distributed as a side load, just not on AMO. It hasn’t been updated in a year. The policy position changed yesterday.

Bergamot was there for at least months (for example, the JD for the Bergamot-Mozilla collaboration was posted before this May [1]) and only advertised a few days ago. It is most likely a coincidence, given that Google and Microsoft has full rights to complain to Mozilla. Or, in the reverse direction, they may have complained because of public articles about Bergamot.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190520103652/https://careers.m...

Hi, I'm the PI of Bergamot. We're funded by this call https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/port... and turned in the proposal on 18 April 2018. The project started 1 January 2019.

I made a post roughly two hours ago on the Firefox Reddit about your add-on getting disabled (a poster there provided me with an excellent workaround), and now come back to HN and this is the top post.

I really really hope this is a coincidence vs. Mozilla having some sort of tiff with Google and us being in the crossfire.

Your extension clearly breaks their rules. Come on now.

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