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The Firefox browser now has a built-in page translator that works even without the Internet
(gadgettendency.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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I'm sure there's some use cases out there, but that kind of sounds dumb at first. You can use a built-in page translator that translates web pages... without the internet. How are you getting to these pages in the first place then? I'm assuming the appeal is more from the privacy aspect, because it's not communicating with anyone else to get those translations?
I’m sure the privacy minded people like it. As opposed to a translating service knowing all the webpages you’re reading.
"Works offline" doesn't necessarily mean it never goes online.
It doesn't necessarily mean it, but the context here is pretty obvious. Firefox has long been privacy friendly.
However, like others pointed out, this feature is useful in numerous use cases beyond just privacy. E.g. one of the systems I manage at work is a stand alone network, i.e. not connected to any external network whatsoever. I've had instances where having this feature would've been convenient. Then you have scenarios where you're offline on a plane or an Internet outage or whatever. Your browser can open all kinds of document types, not just HTML (e.g. text files, PDF files, etc.).
You can open local html documents in your browser. They don't need to be downloaded from the internet. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as for CLI tools that produce HTML to visualize data.
I think the point isn't that you wouldn't be connected to the internet, rather that the translator itself isn't yet another thing that will phone home with all of your data
It's, for example, quite important for folks handling internal documents in a company. You get those documents served via the company's intranet, so not publicly accessible. And if you click that translate-button with other translators, that internal document is published into the internet, which is a breach of confidentiality, or even a breach of contract, if you're handling supplier documents.
If your company is big enough, it may have a self-hosted translation service that you can use, but for everyone else, foreign language documents were a bit of a problem so far.
It's much faster for one. Google Translate is super slow compared to this and it sometimes refuses to work if the Google overlords think you might be a bot or something.