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Comment by fyrn- | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate that it's not available for Firefox mobile, for me at least, mobile is where I want translation. For example when traveling and viewing the sites of businesses

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Also doesn't work on Firefox Nightly on Mobile.

However on the plus side, I'm not seeing a complete inability to translate in Nightly since the context menu let's me translate using Google Translate (i realise many won't want to send their text off to G but this does at least show up one of the claimed limitations in the article, that it simply wasn't possible at all)

Google Translate works offline if you download the language pair. If you block Google Translate from data then you have an offline translator.

Maybe it's too demanding to run on a devices with very little cooling and power? Just a guess

It requires x86/64 because it runs on WebAssembly.

That seems wrong? As far as I am aware WebAssembly is completely architecture-agnostic, and Firefox has implemented wasm VMs for both x86-84 and ARM.

And even if it wasn't architecture-agnostic, it's pretty easy to translate restricted and well-behaved machine code between architectures. Much easier than dealing with javascript itself.

> It requires x86/64 because it runs on WebAssembly.

What is the technical requirement behind this?

There is none, one of the main objectives of WASM was to be a machine agnostic bytecode, similar to JVM bytecode for example. People have even built wasm VMs on FPGAs

This is a false statement

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