Mozilla is porting the private translations feature of the desktop version of its Firefox web browser to the Android version. The organization introduced translations support in Firefox 118. A core difference between Mozilla’s implementation and that in other browsers is that Mozilla’s runs locally.
When you use Google Translate or Bing Translate, data is transferred to Google or Microsoft servers. It is processed there and then returned to the browser.
Firefox translates webpages directly on the device. No data is transferred to Mozilla or elsewhere. In other words, Mozilla does not know the text that you want translated nor the site it is published on.
Firefox for Android: first look at translate feature
Translate is only available if Firefox Nightly for Android at the time. Even there, it is not visible right away but needs to be enabled by users.
Here is how that is done:
- Select Menu > Settings.
- Open About Firefox.
- Tap five times on the Mozilla logo on the page until you get the notification that debug is enabled.
- Go back to the main Settings page.
- Locate the Secret Settings menu.
- Toggle “Enable Firefox Translations” to turn the translate feature on.
A new translate icon is now displayed in the address bar when you open a foreign language page.
Tap on the icon to get options to translate the content into another language.
Firefox Translate for Android: the options
The main translate menu lists the source and the target language only. You may change those and hit the translate button to get the page translated immediately.
A tap on the settings icon displays translate options. Here you may enable “always” or “never” translate options. These are:
- Always translate a specific language. When enabled, Firefox will translate the language automatically when it encounters it.
- Never translate a language. Blocks translate functionality for pages in that specific language.
- Never translate this site. Blocks translate functionality on the current site, but not on others.
Firefox uses local language pack for its translates. These need to be downloaded once for each language and this happens automatically when you select the translate option the first time for that language.
You may download all languages immediately in the Firefox settings. Note that this version of the translate feature supports only the four languages English, French, Italian, and German. All language packs have a size of about 28 megabytes.
Closing Words
It is unclear when the translate feature is rolling out in Firefox Stable for Android. It is likely that this is going to happen later in 2024, but Mozilla has not announced its plans yet in this regard.
Since translations happen locally, it is privacy-friendly. There is one downside at the moment: language support.
The desktop version of Firefox supports just a few dozen languages at this point. These will all come to Firefox for Android, but it may take a long time before Firefox’s translate feature supports the majority of languages.
Still, Mozilla is bringing another requested feature to Firefox for Android. This helps close the feature gap between Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. Also worth to note is that Firefox supports features that major Chromium-based browsers do not support. Extensions support is a major one.
While Microsoft is working on bringing extensions support to its Edge for Android browser, it is not there yet.