Did you know that Firefox has a translation feature similar to Google Chrome? Most people probably don't, as the feature isn't enabled by default and isn't visible in the application's settings.
The Mozilla Foundation revealed in February 2014 that it was working on integrating a translation feature into Firefox, and it actually started including the feature in Nightly builds of the browser in May 2014.
The first version used Bing Translate content and worked similarly to Chrome's Google Translate app.
It displayed a notification when a user visited a page that used a language different from the ones installed in Firefox. The notification listed the language of the page and suggested translation options.
The Mozilla Foundation also added support for Yandex Translate in Firefox 41, released in mid-2015. However, the translation features remained only in Nightly builds and were never pushed to the stable channel. The next three years (2015 – 2018) saw only a few fixes and no new features.
Last week , however, the Mozilla Foundation began adding support for the Google Translate translation engine to the Firefox browser.
While the feature is not yet fully functional, it is a sign that the Mozilla Foundation has not forgotten about the translation feature. If you want to enable it in Firefox, open the internal address about:config.
Look for the following commands:
browser.translation.detectLanguage – set the value to True and Firefox will detect the language of a page.
browser.translation.engine – determines which translation service Firefox will use. Supported services are Google, Bing, and Yandex.
browser.translation.ui.show – determines whether Firefox will display the translation UI when detecting foreign languages. With a value of True, it will display the user interface, while with a value of False it will hide it.
Google Translate is currently unavailable in Firefox, and if you try to use it, you’ll see an error message. Bing and Yandex don’t seem to be working at the moment either, although Firefox does seem to be trying to translate the page. Eventually, the error message “There was an error translating this page.”
Google Translate requires an API key, which is usually only available if companies or users pay for the key. It’s not known whether the Mozilla Foundation plans to make a deal with Google or if users will have to add the API key themselves to get this functionality. The latter would certainly be very restrictive.
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