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Comment by closewith

19 days ago

What is a lot?

Before integration, it had ~490 users as an extension, vs ~800,000 for To Google Translate, the number one option.

Offline translation has to be manually enabled per language in Settings.

Frankly I don't believe there's any meaningful usage until I see the numbers.

>enabled per language in Settings.

Do they? I tried opening a French government site[1] and received the Firefox pop-up offering to translate the page. I did not have to enable anything in settings neither is the French language model downloaded. It seems translations are enabled by default.

[1]: https://www.elysee.fr/

  • I stand corrected on this point, the language packs now auto-download.

    It's still a niche feature only partially built by a Horizon project (it was almost entirely built by commercial entities - MS and Mozilla) in a niche browser.

    It's an indictment of the Horizon programme that this is considered the pre-eminent success story.

    • Its actually helped me a twice the last two weeks and I would browse mostly English language sites and I imagine it would be great if English wasn't your first language.

      I didn't even know it was a new Firefox feature but I thought it was cool.

      Well done EU.

    • You really can't win with some people.

      If the EU invests into research and development of a feature that a US tech company already offers (as a proprietary, closed-source service), it's needless duplication and a futile effort in catching up.

      Yet if it doesn't, that's admitting defeat in the face of competitors and the wrong move as well.

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I believe to the order of millions of translations per day, but again, I don't remember where to view this, so might not be correct. But it's definitely orders of magnitude larger than 100s of users.

(And indeed, as a sibling comment points out, the feature is suggested to users in context, which of course massively helps with discoverability, so it's no surprise to me that it's used way more often than the extension.)