Frill: A Chinese pop-up dictionary extension for Safari

Frill is a Chinese to English pop-up dictionary extension for Safari that I wrote after I started using Safari as my main web browser at home.

Previously I had been using Perapera with Chrome and loved it, but there weren’t any options for Safari (I’ve covered pop-up dictionary browser add-ons previously). Today, I’ve been able to release the first version after several weeks of sporadic development. Here’s a screenshot of what it currently looks like:

A demonstration of the Frill pop-up Chinese dictionary in action.

For those interested, a few features:

  • It uses the CC-CEDICT dictionary, which has over 100,000 definitions.
  • It supports both simplified and traditional characters.
  • There’s a toolbar button to enable/disable it.
  • It’s free!
  • It’s open source, released under a CC-BY-SA license.

DOWNLOAD FRILL HERE

Please feel free to give any feedback, especially bug reports or feature requests. I’d love to hear from anyone using it!

(Note that this extension only works for Safari on OS X. Safari for iOS (iPhone/iPad) doesn’t support extensions.)

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7 thoughts on “Frill: A Chinese pop-up dictionary extension for Safari

  1. PATRICK BROWN says:

    Learned about this from a tweet… trouble free fast download… on a quick spin through a few Chinese documents it seems to work extremely well. Thanks for an exceptionally useful tool.

  2. Ed says:

    This is useful. Many thanks for putting this together.

    Can you add some customization to resize fonts, etc? Also saving words to a default list.

  3. Mike Zwei says:

    Hi, I just learned about Frill, installed it, very content ! 🙂 I was thinking about switching to Firefox because there’s Perapera Chinese, also a pop up instant vocabulary display tool. But now I can stay with safari, very convenient. Thank you !!!! 🙂

  4. Yann says:

    I meant to thank you for your awesome Safari’s extension. The only thing that was preventing me from using Safari over Chrome over the past years was the absence of a mouse hover chinese translation! Now you’ve done it and I’m saved, I can get back to Safari!
    So a big “thank you” for your work!
    Yann

  5. Caitlin says:

    This is fantastic! The app works great and is really helping me improve my Chinese. Before reading articles was so laborious, because I’d have to stop and look up words. This is incredibly easy. I realize you’ve put a lot into this little labor of love, so thank you SO MUCH!

  6. Kirsten says:

    This is seriously amazing!! Thank you so so much for making this, and for making it free to boot! I’m so excited not to be scared of reading articles in Chinese anymore 🙂

  7. Hubert Seiwert says:

    Unfortunately, I was unable to install the extension because Safari (12.1.1.) reports that it doesn’t support “insecure extensions” any more.

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