Post #571270

2026-03-07 14:25 UTC

Full-page machine translations are disabled Firefox translations are done offline (after downloading the model for a langauge pair). Does anybody know why Konform decided to disable this very useful feature?

Replies (1)

@ken@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-03-07 15:06

Oh, thanks for bringing that up - it’s out of date and no longer true so I guess I do need to update the readme. While you are correct, the offline translations feature in Firefox won’t work when blocking its access to RemoteSettings. As Konform Browser does have a strict policy of not initiating connections to “trusted” servers on its own, it made more sense to remove it than leaving UI for a completely broken feature. Since that was written: That bug was fixed in Konform so translations do work fully offline now (if models are available locally) An about:welcome “onboarding” screen was introduced where user has 4 presets to choose from. 3 of them (all but Purely Private 🔒️) enable translations feature and 2 (✳️Basic Functionality and 🦊Just Make It Work) enable the automatic downloads of models from Mozilla server like in FF. So in reality I would say offline local translations actually work better in Konform than in upstream and other forks. In the future hoping to improve this further by redistributing the models as packages for separate installation on system. Then you can use them without needing the browser itself to download anything at all. Similarly to how it’s already done for spelling dictionaries and uBlock Origin.

Open ##571795