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by roywiggins 156 days ago
Firefox's translation by default does pop up to interrupt and ask if you want to translate a page that it's detected is in another language. We're just more used to that and it's a more reliable signal that you probably want to run a tool than most.

It's still relatively new in FF and I don't think I've seen anyone complaining about it annoying them with popups, even though it absolutely does throw up an interrupting overlay, especially on mobile.
2 comments
downsplat 156 days ago
I definitely complain about this one. I can read a few languages, and rarely if ever browse a page in a language I don't understand, so popups with "do you want to translate this" are unwelcome here. It doesn't help that in the first iterations Firefox didn't offer a quick way to turn the whole thing off.
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fc417fc802 156 days ago
You can disable the popup but still invoke the tool manually from the main menu. I reaffirm my previously expressed dissatisfaction with modern software "features" and add that there are plenty of defaults in Firefox that I personally dislike. That includes anything that pops up unsolicited without good reason.
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roywiggins 156 days ago
From a UI perspective, auto tab groups are just an extra button as far as I can tell, so it's not clear why it's getting the axe from this site, just from a pure "this is annoying" point of view.

The flow is 1) you drag a tab over another tab and it suggests a name for the tab group and 2) you click on a tab group and another button offers to suggest more of your tabs you can add to the group. That's less intrusive than Firefox Translations are by default.

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