Things They Should Invent: web interface for Too Good To Go

I recently learned about an app called "Too Good To Go", which lets you buy food that's close to expiry at a discount, to help reduce food waste.

Problem: it's only an app. There's no web interface whatsoever.

This means you have to download the app not just to place an order, but also to see what restaurants are on it and what they charge for the discounted food - basically to find out whether it even has the possibility to be useful to you!

This is an accessibility issue for some people (browsers can be more easily customized with accessibility tools), a pain point for me personally (whenever I'm ordering food I'm already at a computer, so having to dig out a smaller, less user-friendly device is an additional layer of inconvenience), and also makes me suspicious.

Generally, when companies try to push you towards an app for something that can easily be done with a website, it's because they're trying to collect user data or prevent users from blocking ads or tracking. 

Given that everywhere I order food from has a web interface, I can't imagine any technical reason why this would need to be app only. Which makes me wonder if there's an ulterior motive.

Even if there is some technical reason why Too Good To Go wouldn't be able to make a web interface, they should at least let participating restaurants include Too Good To Go bags on their own online ordering web interfaces, so existing customers don't have to switch devices to take advantage of this very useful initiative!

Firefox's translation feature needs to be suppressed on pages that already have an official target language version

Recent versions of Firefox have a "translate this page" function that pops up if it detects that the webpage is in a language other than the preferred language indicated in your settings.

They need to figure out a way to stop this from automatically popping up when an official version of the page exists in your preferred language.

 

For example, if I, with my default English settings, end up on the French version of the federal government's COVID wastewater monitoring dashboard, a conspicuous "Translate this page" bubble pops up front and centre. 

This is a problem, because an official English version of the page exists. You can access it by clicking the English link on the top right. And the automatically translated version is never going to be as good or as authoritative as the official English version.

Screenshot of linked page, with the English link at the top right highlighted

 

People outside of translation/language intersection spaces don't always know that pages with multiple language versions exist, but they are common, especially in institutional (government, education, etc.) spaces that provide official information.

 

Firefox's translation feature needs to avoid distracting these uninformed users from the existence of the official multilingual versions that they may not even know to look for.

So how do you do that from a programming perspective?

Preliminary idea to build on: what if the translation feature could detect the name of the target language in the target language? If the user has English set as their default language, it detects the word "English" on the page. Perhaps it could highlight it? Perhaps the translation feature could say "An official version may exist"?

This wouldn't catch every instance. Some websites use abbreviations (en, fr, de, es, pl) and some websites use flags. However, there may be a finite number of ways that these are coded, or commonalities to the scripts used to switch the language, or indicators in the metadata.

Another possibility would be to have the pop-up appear elsewhere on the page (maybe towards the bottom left of the visible portion?) so it's less likely to cover the link to the official version. 

In any case, however well-intentioned this automatic translation feature is, it needs to avoid making it difficult to find the official version of the page in the target language.