Chrome downloads a translation model per language pair, once per
browser profile, and it takes 30 seconds to two minutes. It is the
longest wait anywhere in this product, and until now it was only ever
met as an unexplained pause after a first press — which is
indistinguishable from the extension being broken.
The popup now reads the language of the page you are on, asks Chrome
about that exact pair, and says one of four things: ready, downloading,
not downloaded yet with a "Download it now" button, or a pair Chrome
will not do at all and Ollama should. The pair matters — models are per
pair, so telling a reader of Japanese pages that en->zh-Hant is ready
would be worse than saying nothing.
The download runs in the popup rather than through the background,
because Chrome refuses to start one outside a user gesture: measured
directly, an extension page throws `NotAllowedError: Requires a user
gesture` while availability is `downloadable`, and the button click is
the gesture. The service worker has no such gate, which is why a
translation started from the toolbar can still download one by itself.
Two fixes come with it.
The progress badge no longer sits at "0%" for a minute and a half. The
download monitor's granularity is not something a caller can rely on:
measured at 479 progress events for en->zh-Hant and exactly two, 0 then
1, for en->ko, which took 81 seconds. A percentage that opens at zero
and stays there reads as stuck, which is the impression the line exists
to prevent.
And the popup could report on the wrong engine. The stored settings and
the page's language arrive on separate promises, in either order, and
the new pack line rendered from whichever landed last — so a user on
Ollama could be shown Chrome's pack status, permanently if the page
answered first. It now waits for the settings to reach the form.
Verified in a real browser: the popup opened over a live page named
en -> zh-Hant and reported it ready, switching the target to Japanese
re-asked and reported en -> ja not downloaded, and the button
downloaded it and ended at ready.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
