It's not mere familiarity. Machine translation is immediately useful to me. I was going to pull up google translate anyway; keeping it local to my device improves both convenience and privacy.

A local LLM that I explicitly bring up to ask a question and dismiss (ie no CPU or RAM usage) when I'm done consulting it is nice. A piece of software I'm using interrupting what I'm doing to ask me a useless and annoying question or to make an unsolicited change to my workspace leaves me thinking about permanently uninstalling it.

I will never want automatic tab groups or automatic anything else. I don't even want an "integrated" desktop environment - I use i3 to get away from that. I hate all the useless bullshit half baked features that are constantly shoved in my face.

If the modern web was compatible with it I'd use a text based browser for 90% of what I do online. And if that were the case I'd still welcome a built in machine translation feature because it's an incredibly useful tool.

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roywiggins 14 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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downsplat 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	roywiggins 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.