How to remove Google Translate banner that suddenly appears in some pages - even in Safe Mode
Today I suddenly got a Google Translate banner at the top of a scientific journal page. Try for example
and see enclosed image (for a similar page). I never saw such a banner before. I do not want it nor any Google-translate services.
Tried the following:
- Erase cookies and cache – banner still appears
- Restart in Safe Mode - banner still appears
- Remove Google from my search engines (even though it's not the default) - banner still appears
- Set "geo.enabled" to False in about:config - banner still appears
- Set "browser.translation.engine" to empty (why was it set to "Google"??) in about: config - banner still there
- Disable safe browsing in Settings - banner still appears
I do not have any Google services (such as Google Updater) otherwise installed in my laptop. In fact, if I open that page in Internet Explorer I don't see the banner.
I see the same banner if I visit from Firefox on Android, though.
How's this possible? Why is Firefox sending my data to Google, even in Safe Mode, without my permission? How do I block this and stop seeing that banner?
Modified by pglpm
All Replies (6)
Is the banner on other websites? If not, the banner could be part of that webpage.
Please provide a public link (no password) that we can check out. No Personal Information Please !
Thank you for looking into this, and sorry for not posting a webpage example. I modified my post now.
I don't think it's only part of that website; it must result from some interaction with Firefox, because the banner doesn't appear if I access the page with Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge (same laptop, same locale).
This Google Translate widget is automatically added by webpages via JavaScript and there no way to prevent this. Maybe they detect that you are in a not English speaking region/country, so this can also happen if you use a VPN.
Thank you cor-el. I'm curious then about why Explorer or Edge don't show the banner. I just checked, and javascript is enabled in both. Any idea why? How can I change my Firefox configuration to obtain the same behaviour (not showing the script)?
Also, my locale and language in Firefox are set to "en,en-GB,en-CA,en-US", if that's important.
One more strange point: the webpage above shows a "translation disclaimer" which says "You have requested a machine translation of selected content from our databases...".
But I actually haven't. The setting "Translate web content" is actually turned off. So why does the page think that I requested a machine translation? Is it possible that there's some misconfiguration of Firefox?
Update: I managed to remove the intrusive google-translation bar by using the uBlock Origin extension. However, this is just a make-do temporary fix. I think there's some misconfiguration in Firefox that should be fixed.