Project Naptha text on image recognition technology comes to Firefox

Project Naptha is without doubt one of the coolest extensions for the Google Chrome web browser. It enables you to select text on images to copy it to the clipboard.

That's great if you need access to that text, for instance to paste it in an email or a social media website, or to edit it in a text editor. While it is possible to copy the text manually, it may take quite some time depending on the length of the text.

The extension has been exclusively available for Google Chrome for some time. but has been available for Firefox for some time now as well.

You can download the most recent version of Project Naptha for Firefox from the official Mozilla Add-ons repository. While it promises the same functionality as the Chrome version, I had issues with it right from the start.

The main problem that I ran into was that it would not allow me to copy text from any image displayed in Firefox. I tried to do so in two different versions of the browser, one without any add-ons installed, and it still would not work.

I'm not entirely sure why it is not working but since there is no older version to try, I have to assume that the extension itself is not working properly at the time of writing (feel free to correct me if you find out that it works on your system).

According to the page on the Mozilla website, it should work automatically whenever images with text are recognized by it. When that is the case, it becomes possible to select that text to copy it to the clipboard or right-click to use other functionality such as translating the text into a different language.

I have contacted the author asking about the behavior and will update the article once I get a reply.

It is possible that this is still an issue on my end  and that it will work fine for others. If you give it a try let me know if it works for you.

The availability of the extension for Firefox is still great for the browser considering that the technology works fine on Chrome. If it gets fixed or resolved, it will surely become a popular extension for the web browser.

Update: It appears that the author of the extension has pulled it from the Add-ons repository. It is unclear if development will continue.