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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

> Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?

Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.

> Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?

Yeah. And?

> Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?

No because I ctrl-f for that topic/key words and find the text.

These are incredibly poor AI sells...

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>Yes. Firefox and Chrome already offer this.

yes, both use machine learning methods to translate pages. You're already using AI and don't realize it.

That’s different from an agentic browser in a few key ways.

Most importantly it’s far more difficult for a bad actor to abuse language translation features than agentic browser features.

"AI" as it's used nowadays is unfortunately usually a shorthand for LLM. When firefox talks about "AI features", I think most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.

LLMs are sequence-to-sequence like language translation models, were invented for the purpose of language models, and if you were making a translator today it would be structured like an LLM but might be small and specialized.

For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:

  I'm replying to ... and want to say ... in a way that is compatible in tone

and then get something that I can understand enough to say

  I didn't expect to see ... what does that mean?

And also run a reverse translation against a different model, see that it makes sense, etc. Or if I am reading a light novel I might be very interested in

  When the story says ... how is that written in Japanese?

I think it's simpler than that. AI is fast becoming synonymous with something being force fed and generally unwanted.

>Starting today, Google Translate uses advanced Gemini capabilities to better improve translations on phrases with more nuanced meanings like idioms, local expressions or slang.

https://blog.google/products/search/gemini-capabilities-tran... [Dec 12, 2025]

Firefox is local

  > most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.

Which seems to be the problem. People don't even realize they're being irrational, despite Mozilla being quite transparent about what they're doing. It's pretty clear.

I mean a Firefox download is 150MB, not 16GB...

Plus, we know what Firefox is looking to do. In their labs tab they let you opt into trying out semantic search of your history. So that's a vector embedding model, not an LLM.

Edit:

Okay, they have "Shake to summarize". But that's a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. Nothing shipped with the browser. Similarly I don't understand how the chatbot window is so controversial. I̶'̶m̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶r̶t̶c̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶d̶o̶w̶s̶,̶ ̶but are people really pressing <C-x> on a mac or ctrl+alt+x on linux/windows? It's not a LLM shipped with the browser, it is just a window split ("shortcut") to literally one of the most popular websites on the internet right now (ChatGPT is literally the #5 most visited website and you all think AI is unpopular?!). Adding shortcuts isn't shoving AI down your throat. Are they shoving Wikipedia down your throat because you can do "!w hacker news"? Give me a break guys

Even if they didn't realize it, I don't believe they were arguing that firefox and chrome didn't/wouldn't use machine learning already, rather that they just thought the use cases you provided don't really sell the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install.

This is exactly it.

  > the cost of having a full LLM integrated into every browser install

What's this even mean?

There's no fucking way there's going to be a "full LLM integrated into every browser." You really think they're going to drop in a 20GB-200GB model with every browser? Mind you, Llama-8B is over 15GB.

Nah. So far they are doing about 50MB per language translation that you ask for[0]. You have to explicitly install languages to translate.

There's neither "a full blown LLM" (whatever that means) nor forcing AI onto you. You still have to download the language packs, they are just offering an extension that more seamlessly integrates with the browser.

And we know what they're building too! Go look in the "Labs" tab and you'll see an opt-in for testing a semantic search of your history. That doesn't take an LLM to do, that takes a vector embedding model. What next? Semantic search in page? How terrible of a feature! (But seriously, can we get regex search?)

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/neural-machine-translation...

Okay, what's the problem? The UX of Google Translate is fine

- it will pop up when it senses a webpage in a language you don't speak.

- it will ask if you want to translate it. You have options to always translate this language or to never do it.

- it will respect your choice and no pop up every-time insisting "no please try it this time". Or worse, decide by default to translate anywyay behind my back.

- There are settings to also enable/disable this that will not arbitrarily reset whenever the app updates.

There are certainly environmental issues to address, but I've accepted that this US administration is not going to address this in any meaningful way. Attacking individuals will not solve this issue so I'm not doing this. So for now, my main mantra is "don't bother me". the UX of much AI can't even clear that.

Alternatively: they’re already taking advantage of the AI features they like without at all needing “AI in the browser” and do realise it.

Nowadays they call AI everything. Browsers translate websites from decades, when AI was only a word you would see in science fiction movies.

AI is a broad term going back to 1955. It covers many different techniques, algorithms, and topics. The first AI chess programs (DeepBlue, et. al.) were using tree search algorithms like alpha-beta pruning that are/were classified as AI techniques.

Machine translation is a research topic in AI because translating from one language to another is something humans are good at while computers are not traditionally.

More recently, the machine learning (ML) branch of AI has become synonymous with AI as have the various image models and LLMs built on different ML architectures.

"See but what if instead of ctrl+F, we fired up a nvdia gpu in a data center instead .... "

I'll pass. Also for people that already know another language, the auto translate is annoying, inaccurate, and strips all of the humanity out of the writing.

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