Auto-detect already worked — the backend returns
detectedLanguage:{language,confidence} and the panel put it in the
status line. But that only appeared after a translation had already
run, in small text, away from the control that raised the question. You
could not tell what "Auto-detect" had decided before committing to it.
The first row of the source select now says "Auto-detect · German", and
it says so while you are still typing. Detection runs on its own via
LibreTranslate's /detect, debounced 700 ms and gated at 12 characters,
because a detector given two words is guessing and firing per keystroke
would pound a public mirror for nothing. It chains the same mirror
fallback as translation, so a dead primary does not make detection look
broken while translating still works.
Confidence below 60 renders as "German?" rather than silently asserting
a coin-flip. The Google backend has no detect-only route, so there
doDetect returns null instead of burning a request, and the label is
filled from the translation response — which every backend returns
anyway, so a skipped or failed detect is never worse than before.
Detection retires when a source is named explicitly, comes back on
returning to Auto-detect, and is wiped by clear. A right-click
selection schedules one too, since that text arrives with no keystroke.
Verified against the real mirror (de/fr/ja at 100/100/90%) and in the
harness: short text fires nothing, long text fires once, four rapid
edits debounce to one call, and every transition above lands.
Also adds the xray removal script used to take the old engine off all
three exits now that they run sing-box.
Auto-translate: changing either language only called saveUi(), so the
pane below kept showing the previous language's result with nothing to
say it was stale — you had to notice and press Translate. Both selects
now re-run the translation, guarded on empty input and on
source === target (which would only echo the input back).
Text size: the panes were 13.5px, small for reading a paragraph in a
language you don't know well, which is the entire job. Base is now
15px, driven by a --tsize custom property so both panes stay matched.
Zoom: −/+ either side of a percentage in the header, 70–220% in steps
of 10, clamped with the buttons disabling at each end. Click the
percentage to reset. Ctrl/Cmd with +, - or 0 does the same from either
pane. Persists per-machine alongside the language choice.
Icon: a globe with an A tile and a 文 tile, replacing the 🌐 emoji that
was indistinguishable from every other globe in the dock. Drawn against
the 16px and 18px rasterizations rather than at a comfortable size —
the first pass used a font glyph for 文 and it turned to grey mush at
16px, so the strokes are hand-drawn paths thick enough to survive. Also
drops the hardcoded icon in registerSidebarPanel, which would otherwise
shadow the manifest's mark.
Verified in a harness with a stubbed host API: language change fires
exactly one request, the two guards fire none, zoom clamps and persists,
and the layout holds at sidebar width.
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.
