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Comment by vanilla_nut | Hacker News Reader

I use Librewolf as my main browser, instead of Firefox. I understand that Librewolf is a fork of FF, so it's not necessarily 100% API compatible with FF addons. But especially without network access, I wonder why Firefox Translate won't work in Librewolf. Maybe Librewolf disables some ML/AI features?

It's a shame; I'd like to use FF Translate instead of Google Translate. But Mozilla's telemetry and frequent style changes that break my Userchrome.css styling are a bit of a dealbreaker.

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It might be because Firefox Translate hooks into some private extension apis (for browser chrome and telemetry) that you can only use when your extension is signed by Mozilla itself. Maybe those apis have been removed from Librewolf, or it doesn’t accept Mozilla’s certificate as an exception.

I maintain a forked version of the Firefox extension[^1] that doesn’t use any private apis (or telemetry). It is slightly different[^2], but uses the same libraries.

Disclosure: I work for one of the project partners and contributed to the Mozilla extension.

[^1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/translateloca...

[^2]: https://github.com/jelmervdl/translatelocally-web-ext#differ...

How doable would it be for devs to integrate local translations in their websites and webapps? Do you think we'd ever get to a point where we can include a single <script> tag and have access to this stuff?

We can already. Almost. The translator works perfectly* as just a web page[1]. It is only a matter of combining that bit with the full-page translation code[2] and some UI to toggle it.

It is a bit of a question whether this is the way to go. You're downloading about 20mb to get all the plumbing + translation models necessary to translate a page. It would be okay if it were widespread enough that we can assume everyone already has these in their browser cache, but the trend is moving away from that model of caching[3].

* given your browser support wasm SIMD. So an x86 processor with SSE4.1, although M1 also seems to work. And no Safari, because they haven't implemented wasm SIMD[4].

[1] https://translatelocally.com/web/

[2] https://github.com/jelmervdl/translatelocally-web-ext/blob/m...

[3] https://developer.chrome.com/en/blog/http-cache-partitioning...

[4] https://webassembly.org/roadmap/

This is really encouraging to know. I was thinking more along the line of electron apps and other local-first pwas rather than normal webpages where an 20MB increase is relatively insignificant compared to the benefits it provides (privacy, robustness, no third party apis, etc).

You can block telemetry with a hosts file[0], and update less often by running ESR.

0: https://github.com/MrRawes/firefox-hosts

> You can block telemetry with a hosts file

Are you talking about Firefox or Chrome?

You shouldn't have to block it with your hosts file for firefox since you can just disable it.

Taking a look at the domain names it appears that would also break updating addons not just the browser updates, so all preferred addons would have to be mirrored and installed locally.

If you're running Debian you can also let the system package manager handle it, eg webext-ublock-origin.

Telemetry can be disabled on: about:addons -> Firefox Translations -> Preferences and then disabling "Report high-level user interaction" and "Report errors"

I'm also using Librewolf, and I have no issues using Firefox translate. I must have changed several settings over time, including about:config flags, but apparently it definitely is possible.

Apart from that, I assume it's quite difficult for anyone to help you based on the error description "doesn't work".

Sorry, you're totally correct that "doesn't work" is a poor description of the problem. Unfortunately the failure case doesn't really give me any feedback; no matter what I do, the "Firefox Translations" button in the URL bar remains grey and doesn't produce a dialog. Clicking on the toolbar Firefox Translations button yields empty language dropdowns and a seemingly-neverending "Loading Translation Engine" message. I don't think I have anything special enabled in my about:config, maybe a few small changes, and this issue has persisted since roughly Librewolf 100.

FWIW, the "TranslateLocally for Firefox" add-on recommended by another user here works great for me.

Telemetry can be disabled on: about:addons -> Firefox Translations -> Preferences and then disabling "Report high-level user interaction" and "Report errors"

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