Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Name change of one Firefox extension


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.
 
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