Firefox is an open source web browser developed for different platforms, it is coordinated by Mozilla and the Mozilla Foundation.
In the last days, a large number of users showed their anger and indignation against Firefox on the Reddit forums. The reason was that Mozilla mistakenly added the ability to display ads to Firefox for the Mozilla VPN service implemented in the form of a pop-up window.
The ad turned intrusive, since it overlays the content of arbitrary open tabs until the ad unit is closed, blocking work with the current page.
Initially affected users began reporting websites on which the intrusive ad was shown, but when the complaints accumulated and they saw that the ad was displayed randomly and not on certain sites, in addition to the fact that the webmasters of the sites will also claim, They realized that the displayed ad was not a matter of the websites but the browser itself.
In the complaints filed, users highlighted the inadmissibility of the intrusive method implemented by Mozilla to promote its services, which interferes with the functioning of the browser. It is noteworthy that the close button was almost imperceptible in the ad window (a cross blending into the background, not immediately striking) and there was no opportunity to decline further advertising (to close the blocking ad window, the "Not Now" link was offered, with no possibility final rejection).
Screenshot of the advertising banner in Firefox
Some users reported that the browser froze while displaying an ad unit, which lasted about 30 seconds. The site owners also expressed their outrage, since inexperienced users had the impression that this site displays intrusive advertising, and not the browser that replaces it.
In addition, an error was identified in the implementation of the ad display, so the ad unit was appearing during the operation and not after 20 minutes of user inactivity, as originally intended. After a wave of user dissatisfaction, the display of Mozilla VPN ads in the browser was disabled (browser.vpn_promo.enabled=false in about:config).
On the other hand, it's also worth noting that the Nightly builds of Firefox (which will form the basis of the July 4th release of Firefox 115) already feature the build engine. Bergamot translation, which have automatic translation enabled by default from one language to another.
Bergamot is remarkable, since does not depend on the work of others and does not use external cloud services, as the translation is done on the user's local system.
The translation engine Bergamot, is being developed at Mozilla together with researchers from several universities from the United Kingdom, Estonia and the Czech Republic with financial support from the European Union.
The engine is written in C++ and is a wrapper for the Marian machine translation framework, which uses recurrent neural network (RNN) and transformer-based language models. The GPU can be used to speed up learning and translation. The Marian framework is also used to power the Microsoft Translator translation service and is developed primarily by Microsoft engineers in collaboration with researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Poznań.
The engine currently has ready-made models for 16 languages, including experimental models for translation from English to Russian and Ukrainian, and vice versa.
It is worth mentioning that previously Firefox already had a built-in mechanism to translate pages, but it was tied to the use of external cloud services (Google, Yandex and Bing are supported) and was not enabled by default (the "browser.translation" setting is available for inclusion in about:config).
The translation engine supports automatic language detection when opening a page in an unknown language and displays a special prompt asking you to translate the page. There is an automatic translation mode (browser.translations.autoTranslate in about:config).
For those interested, you should know that you can use the "browser.translations.enable" setting in about:config to control whether the translation system is enabled.