I wish I had your optimism. I suspect the opposite though.

A better user experience was never the goal of cloud services. Providing translation and other services in the cloud gives companies massive amounts of data about you that they can leverage to their advantage and gives them opportunities to control and shape what we're allowed to do or see. As long as that stays true there will always be a push for users to give up more control and become more dependent on third parties.

I want to live in a future where more things are done locally and independently, but things are headed in the other direction and there's a lot of money and power behind preventing the pendulum from swinging back. I'll do what I can to fight the trend though, and if this add-on really works as advertised I'll gladly use it.

I think doing machine translation in the cloud makes more sense commercially (easier to monetise) and is a lot less challenging (better hardware, model sizes less of an issue, fewer worries about exposing proprietary code or models).

But I agree that this local experience should be the future. It’s good to have the control and independence.

This is the past...

The pendulum always swings...

Don't say that out loud or the heavens shall burn(cloudnize) this project.

/s