Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fyrn- 1432 days ago
It's unfortunate that it's not available for Firefox mobile, for me at least, mobile is where I want translation. For example when traveling and viewing the sites of businesses
3 comments

Also doesn't work on Firefox Nightly on Mobile.

However on the plus side, I'm not seeing a complete inability to translate in Nightly since the context menu let's me translate using Google Translate (i realise many won't want to send their text off to G but this does at least show up one of the claimed limitations in the article, that it simply wasn't possible at all)

Google Translate works offline if you download the language pair. If you block Google Translate from data then you have an offline translator.
Maybe it's too demanding to run on a devices with very little cooling and power? Just a guess
It requires x86/64 because it runs on WebAssembly.
That seems wrong? As far as I am aware WebAssembly is completely architecture-agnostic, and Firefox has implemented wasm VMs for both x86-84 and ARM.
And even if it wasn't architecture-agnostic, it's pretty easy to translate restricted and well-behaved machine code between architectures. Much easier than dealing with javascript itself.
This is a false statement
> It requires x86/64 because it runs on WebAssembly.

What is the technical requirement behind this?

There is none, one of the main objectives of WASM was to be a machine agnostic bytecode, similar to JVM bytecode for example. People have even built wasm VMs on FPGAs