The panel was doing the HTTP call itself, which meant any mirror sitting
behind a Cloudflare-style anti-bot check returned "<!doctype html>…" for
a POST from Origin: file:// and JSON.parse choked on it. Moving the
fetch into index.js gets rid of the whole class of browser-context
interceptors (CORS preflights, captive portals, anti-bot pages) and
lets the addon look at the response body before trying to parse it —
an HTML body is now reported cleanly as "server returned an HTML page
instead of JSON".
While there, chain a small mirror list — translate.disroot.org,
translate.plausibility.cloud, lingva.ml — so a single mirror being down
does not take the feature with it. A user whose saved URL points at a
mirror that stopped resolving (translate.argosopentech.com is the
notable case) now transparently gets a translation from the next mirror
in line instead of a stack trace.
Verified end-to-end from Node against both a working URL and a dead
one; the dead one falls through to disroot as expected.
Adds a bundled add-on `translate` with a sidebar panel + a right-click
"Translate selection" menu item. Two swappable backends:
- LibreTranslate (default) — free MIT engine; the panel's Settings tab
lets the user point at any instance (public or self-hosted) and drop
in an API key if one's required.
- Google (unofficial free endpoint at translate.googleapis.com/
translate_a/single) — no key, wide coverage, but unofficial and
Google can break it any time. Opt-in fallback.
Flow: user selects text on a page, right-clicks -> "Translate
selection". Add-on's context-menu handler stashes the selection under
storage.__pending and calls api.revealSidebar("main"); the panel
loads, drains __pending on first paint, and translates. Ctrl/Cmd+Enter
in the input textarea also translates. Source + target language
choices, browser-language default target, swap button, copy-to-
clipboard on the output, settings gear.
Depends on a new "context-menu-item" capability + api.revealSidebar
hook in addons-host.js / main.js. Those wiring changes are prepared
but not committed here — a parallel session is refactoring the same
functions concurrently, so the safe path is to land translate/ first
and let the wiring go in alongside the next host-facing commit. Until
the wiring lands, the manifest's "context-menu-item" cap is silently
dropped (per validateManifest's unknown-caps policy) and the sidebar
panel + the panel's translation UI still work standalone — the
right-click entry point is what's gated.
