The add-ons manager in Firefox directed me to a page explaining the removal and this Bugzilla ticket. Mozilla remotely disabled Page Translator for the thousands of people who use it, once again, without warning and without contacting me, the developer. Only, Page Translator had been removed from my browser, without my consent. I rely on in-line language translation in the browser to supplement my nascent Swedish literacy. I am an American living in Sweden and many government websites are only available in Swedish. This morning, I opened up Firefox and wanted to translate a page in Swedish.

Screenshot of Mozilla Add-ons policy when Page Translator was last released, via the Internet Archive. I made it available for installation from its Github repository. They don’t have a way to convert an add-on from a Mozilla-hosted add-on to a self-distributed add-on, so I created a new add-on in order to sign the code for distribution. Mozilla said I could self-distribute it as a side-loaded add-on. Until some point recently, that rule only applied to add-ons distributed through. Mozilla tightened its add-on rules to not permit extensions from loading external JavaScript. Then, Mozilla killed it without discussion. Thousands of people used it and loved it. This brought in-line language translation to Firefox users.

I created a Firefox extension ( Page Translator) that inserts either the Google Translate or Microsoft Translator library into a webpage, as if the website owner had included it. This allows website owners to offer their websites in another language for visitors who use browsers like Safari and Firefox that do not have in-line language translation built-in. They provide a JavaScript library website owners can add to their websites to allow in-line language translation. Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the only browsers to offer in-browser language translation.īoth Google and Microsoft operate language translation services.

In-line language translation in the browser is a necessary feature for millions of people who do not speak the dominant languages online. Summary: Firefox has made the Web less accessible to people who need to access information in another language, taken an absolutist position, and removed freedom of users to extend their browser.

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