Mozilla adds image text recognition to Firefox

Mozilla Firefox will soon be able to extract text from images. The optical text recognition feature will allow you to extract text from images posted on a web page and place the recognized text to the clipboard or read it using a speech synthesizer.

The new option will appear in the context menu of an image. To initiate the process, right-click the image and select Copy text from image from the context menu. The browser will briefly show the "searching image for text" toast. After that you will see a notification that the recognized text is placed to the clipboard.

Currently, developers implemented it for MacOS in the Nightly version of the browser. It will soon come to Windows. On both platforms it will use native built-in APIs.

Due to this fact, its status on Linux isn't clear. Linux doesn't include such APIs. There, image recognition features rely on external software.

By adding such a feature to Firefox, Mozilla makes user's life much more convenient. Currently, Firefox users are forced to use third-party services and apps, like ShareX or Bing Visual search. Having a built-in feature will be very time saving when you quickly need to extract some text from an image.

You can track the progress on this page.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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