I've always been an avid user of the To Google Translate Add-on, but it always bothered me that, despite the Add-on not collecting data, Google does. When I heard about this website translation on-device, I was eager to try it out. Here, I will compare both extensions in terms of their translation accuracy, user interface, translation speed, memory usage, and common issues.

First things first, it is important to highlight that while To Google Translate uses mainly American grammar, Firefox Translations seems to use British grammar. Both extensions perform well when translating texts from German, Portuguese, and Spanish into English, but they both struggle to correctly translate gendered nouns from these languages into English (e.g., "Mitarbeiter*innen" (DE), "funcionários(as)" (PT), "empleados/as" (ES), "employees" (EN)). Both extensions frequently fail to translate between languages other than English. While To Google Translate also struggles with abbreviations and acronyms, Firefox Translations handles them without a problem. To Google Translate tends to provide more literal translations, while Firefox Translations sometimes translates word by word, which is not a smart approach for languages like the ones I tested.

Both extensions have very simple user interfaces that are easy to use, allowing you to select a preferred source language to always be translated. However, Firefox Translations offers a more intuitive and clear interface, while To Google Translate provides options (which must be selected) to translate only a snippet of the page or to show the original text when hovering.

Firefox Translations can translate an entire website with a single click, but I believe that the loading time depends on your device's memory and the size of the page. With 16 GB of RAM, it takes less than a second to load a page with 20 paragraphs of text and a few menus. On the other hand, To Google Translate works on the text visible on your screen, which loads almost instantaneously.

Speaking of memory usage, it's well-known that Chromium-based browsers can be memory-intensive. After opening my browser and loading my homepage in German, memory consumption stabilized around 740 MB. Activating To Google Translate increased memory consumption to 780 MB. Performing the same procedure with Firefox Translations raised memory consumption to 1030 MB, which is understandable since it runs locally.

Both extensions face a similar issue with text formatting, such as removing bullet points and adding spaces before commas. To Google Translate also frequently fails to capitalize letters. While browsing one of my work websites, Firefox Translations deleted a menu both from the interface and the developer tools. This issue occurred only at said website.

Overall, I'm still using To Google Translate until Firefox Translations improves its sentence comprehension and stops deleting menus from websites crucial to my workflow. However, I find the slight time delay when using Firefox Translation to be acceptable considering the significant privacy benefit. I have high hopes for this add-on as it continues its beta testing.