The name of our Firefox extension Google Dictionary and Google Translation is changed to Wiktionary and Google Translation in version 3.0.
As many of you have noticed, the Google Dictionary service (http://www.google.com/dictionary) was shut down not long ago. Consequently, some function of the Google Dictionary and Google Translation extension stopped working -- the old version of the extension looked up the word in both Google Dictionary site and Google Translation site. If you were not looking for a translation, e.g. you wanted the English definition of an English word, Google Translation would not returned any result but Google Dictionary would. After the Google Dictionary site was shut down, our extension became only useful for the translation users.
After evaluating the alternatives, we decided to use Wiktionary as the replacement of Google Dictionary feature of the extension. Wiktionary is powerful and free. But Wiktionary is only well formatted in its English portion. In other languages, it looks free-stylish. Therefore, in the version 3.0, we only support English-English definition from Wiktionary. For those whose language is not English, if you do not mind reading some English, you can select the option "Look up in English too" to enjoy this new feature as well.
The title of the extension in the Mozilla Addons site is not changed yet. So the existing users can still find this extension there and understand what is going on. After most of the existing users have upgraded, we will update the title there.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
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4 comments:
Although Google Dictionary homepage has been shut down the dictionary feature still works as a search tool for regular Google search. Couldn't you update the dictionary feature with that tool? It still returns definitions quite nicely. I'm saying this because Wikitionary is slow and not as good as Google Dictionary. Chrome's extension, which is identical to this one, still fetches results from Google. So I don't think abandonning GD and taking Wikitionary as an alternative wsa a good idea. Please rethink about it.
May cause Firefox crashes. Also conflicts reported with spellchecker in Linux Mac OSX versions. New extensions will not install. Also occurs in version 0.6.4 if updated from an earlier version or if used together with the SessionSaver extension.
Hi. That's all fine, but even though it's set to only look up Spanish it's now looking up English word and every other language, so I click on a Spanish word and it gives me the meaning of the Albanian word it looks very similar to.
This is a great app and I love you forever.
That is very great to have good vocabularly at hand,especially if you need it every day.
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