TL;DR: Mozilla is killing localization on Support Mozilla, overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. Although Mozilla knows that their AI doesn’t localize or adhere to style guides, Mozilla is going live with it anyway. I thank locale leaders and localizers for their tireless efforts. Locale leaders seem to be obviated by AI, and Mozilla has nothing to say about it.
Take a look at servo (https://servo.org/). Not anywhere close to being a robust browser but still something to be excited about.
Why the fuck is lemmy so chuck full of anti Fiirefox and anti Mozilla propaganda?
I even see comments about Firefox needing to be open source again!?!?
It FUCKING IS open source, anybody can fork it if they want to, the only thing they can’t do is use the Firefox logo and name.You are all a bunch of idiots!!
Is it anti Firefox progranda to literally criticize them for reopening human contributed content with lesser quality AI generated one?
Your response to that criticism is to bring up another topic (Firefox being open source) and calling everyone idiots?
Yes they are, because I bet this, as always, is a complete nothing burger, just like the previous 10 times the past year I’ve seen similar baseless attacks on Firefox.
I still use Firefox every day, but I don’t trust the corporate overlords to do what’s right long term. They seem to be getting greedy instead of listening to the user base. They’ve started including AI bullshit features for the sake of it, like grouping tabs by content that nobody asked for and that barely works for me. I’m not anti-Mozilla, but I sure am weary of it and would welcome an alternative.
I haven’t come across any open source comments, but those seem pretty clueless.
I don’t trust the corporate overlords to do what’s right long term.
You don’t have to, if Mozilla really screwed the pooch with Firefox it would be forked. Debian used to do it with IceWeasel over a petty thing like the copyright of the Firefox logo, which 100% has always been justified, and is necessary to distinguish between an official Firefox and a fork.
The AI bullshit features as you call them are completely non invasive, I always use the newest Firefox, and I never even noticed those features.
Stop the bullshitting and complaining over things are completely irrelevant. and will never ever have any negative influence on anything you do with Firefox.
I’m so sick of this lame community doing this over and over and over again, and it always turns out to be nothing.not for the sake of “it”, for the sake of making money. they are competing with the most massive corporations with infinite money.
Why would they override articles that were already done? Makes no fucking sense!
Try to make AI useful, of course.
Mozilla is funded mostly by Google
This doesn’t have anything to do with Google. It’s just Mozilla being overrun by hipsters.
Both can be true at the same time.
Sooooo
Chrome is out
Firefox is put
What is a professional Brower that can do all what the above two can do, but is open source and not riddled with adware or ad allow ware, spyware and other shit?
Is there any browser left that we can still use for all sites?
That depends on your understanting of “professional”. Firefox has forks out here, LibreWolf for example, that removes the AI “features” and other bullshit that crept inside vanilla Firefox
You can try to help fund ladybird maybe? But it is still in development.
If you’re going to fund something, go for Servo
Also very much in development
I can’t say I’m too keen on funding Ladybird, given the shit the lead developer is getting up to (to save you a click: defending white supremacy and transphobia).
I wouldn’t mind donating to have Firefox off of Mozilla’s hands and back into the FOSS sphere where it belongs. Heck i’d even pay a subscription.
It’s just going to line the pockets of executives.
They have the money. They choose not to spend it.
Anytime I see an anti-mozilla article, it’s abundantly clear that it’s an astroturfing campaign to make Firefox look bad. You NEVER see these articles about chrome, brave, opera, etc which are all much much worse.
If I had to post an article here for each time Chrome did something that worked against privacy, I would just repost Ggle’s changelogs. And they would not change.
If we criticise Mozilla harshly enough, there’s a chance slightly higher than an snowball’s chance in hell to make them change.
Put it this way, I don’t trust a corpo browser and never have. 2008 or whenever it was that everyone switched to Chrome, I stayed with Firefox, which I’d been using for a few years already. I remember upgrading to Firefox 2.0.
I’m interested when Firefox is pulling this shit and don’t give a fuck otherwise, because I already assume the others do this.
Idk if we’ll ever get anything decent out of the Servo browser engine. That would be ideal IMO. Mozilla is starting to become part of the problem.
The way they are forcing AI on everyone and into every aspect of their browser especially when a large part of the people who use Firefox hates that shit is going to end Firefox.
The reason you don’t hear it about all those other browsers is because people have always known they don’t give a fuck what the end user wants.
Firefox used to be different. But all good things deteriorate over time. Watching it happen in real time to a browser we all use and used to love is why you see it so much posted especially in places with like minded individuals like Lemmy.
There’s AI in Firefox? I’m running it as new as I can in Arch and have never seen a hint of it.
They’ve also put it into the right click menu. And I think they integrated into the “click and hold link preview” feature they just added. And, annoyingly, with all this added AI, they made no provisions for locally hosted AI.
They also added AI translation in addition to their old translation system for webpages. I think the old one just used Google Translate, so the AI translation is a privacy win because it is done locally, but I may be wrong on how it used to work.
You actually can set up the sidebar to use a local LLM. In about:config the key is something like “browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost”
I have it setup to use my local Ollama instance and it works great.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to specify an alternate external server, which would be nice.
How nice of them to have easy options for paid third party services, and hide the local options under about:config where I’d have no idea it even exists without a kind stranger letting me know.
Yeah, it’s not great that it isn’t visible by default. Would be nice if they had an “add/remove” option as well.
Glad you were able to get it set up!
Thanks for the tip of checking about:config. You can specify an external server, it is also in the about:config. browser.ml.chat.provider. I’m not sure it’s a feature I will ever use, but I tested it with my local Open WebUI and it seemed to work.
Sidebar on the left has one of those star icons that opens an AI chatbot, or you can hit ctrl + alt + x
They keep mentioning AI features, but I haven’t really seen anything annoying yet.
Oh ok. I rarely use any browser features beyond bookmarks. Thats pretty much all I need from a browser. So I don’t explore the side bars and stuff.
I’d say that’s because here on Lemmy, we already don’t give a fuck about and wouldn’t touch Chrome or Edge with a ten foot pole, but some of us trusted Mozzila, which is now starting to do dumb AI shit. And having your trust broken hurts.
Astroturfing would not be recommending LibreWolf as an alternative.
If you look into alternatives, Brave is one that’s usually mentioned but there’s always someone quickly posting all of the dumb shit they did.
Calling objections to what some unelected jerks in the foundation (which is a supposedly public organization) are doing is not “anti-Mozilla”. And I would first suspect of astroturfing everyone pretending it is.
Raising voices and putting pressure about things spoiling something is caring about it. And yes, people who care try to make real effect and not just safely complain to be ignored.
Mozilla honestly has been becoming worse and worse since Australis.
Eh, I’m not about to stop using Firefox, but the complaint is valid. They nuked a bunch of work from volunteers without notice in favor of shitty auto translate.
What an odd comparison. What differentiates Mozilla from others is their close relationship with their community. Just read their manifest and you will see Immediately why they are getting flag for humiliating their own supporters.
Almost all Microsoft KB articles are machine translated.
Every time I open a reddit article from a search it attempts to auto-translate which immediately looks and reads very inhuman.Yeah, I am astroturfing. It can’t be that I actually believed Mozilla when they said that localizers were heroic.
This is bullshit. Brave literally have a webpage mentioning their shit. You are trying to gaslight us all.
Lol, bashing that shitty “org” is a civic duty. Fuck Mozilla.
They like that the money goes to activism on African countries instead of the fcking browser. Just until one year ago they started to work again on features.
I left that sinking ship in 2021. Just watching it sink slowly from the river’s edge.
But this is not about Firefox delelopment, but about community getting overthrown for apparently no reason.
They link to it in the article, but for visibility, the resignation of Japanese SUMO community lead, contributor of 20 years. They voice their concrete issues.
that tonedeaf response of the mozilla staff boils my blood. holy fuck. i hate mozilla so much for years already but in recent times it got so much worse. cant wait to switch to ladybird or other alternatives in the future.
Why? They have free (as in free beer) volunteers. AI could do translation for pages nobody had time to translate yet but taking over the localization seems unnecessary.
Edit: Okay it is kinda like that, the bot automatically translates everything but volunteers can still contribute and provide better localization. It just seems to not work that well, overwriting things it should not when the actual work is just translating one additional sentence. Or simply not being that great at localization. In general AI translation is not a terrible idea but this seems clearly half baked and Mozilla has stopped responding to the complaints which isn’t helping either.
That’s not always great either though because if the AI miss-localizes things, end users in that language wont even know that their documentation is incorrect. Better to have incomplete than wrong documentation. At least then the end user will know they have to try to read a different language. It might be good to use AI to create an unpublished first draft that is then polished by a person before publishing, though it seems the AI is not good enough to be useful in that manner.
Not terrible idea? Did you heard about ai japanase localization disaster?
I mean yes, that is why I wrote the edit. It does seem like you could do this properly, by allowing AI to do rough translations of new articles and humans do proper localization afterwards. And prevent AI from overwriting localization of text that has not actually been altered in the original language.
The problem is that’s not what they’re doing, even after people who volunteered time to work on localisation have asked for the AI to not overwrite existing human-translated documents. That’s the bare minimum, but it seems like it’s too much for Mozilla
While what happened in Japan sucks and calls for an apology by Mozilla towards the team, the general idea of machine translation on demand is one of the few working examples of machine learning. I’d recommend professional systems instead of google translate, though.
It is going to happen to all locales, not just Japan. The Japan locale leader was just a canary in the coalmine.
That’s what you get with dozens of new executives and crazy pay packages for the top brass huh?
I’m losing hope. I might just give in to chromium honestly.
No, do not give into Chromium. Letting Google dominate web rendering standards is a bigger problem.
I agree, and I honestly don’t want to go chromium… But Mozilla is making it harder and harder to even want to use their product.
I’m not getting off Firefox/Floorp yet, but Mozilla needs to stop messing this up so royally at every turn…
Looking at the situation and deciding that prefering Chrome would be better is exactly the bot position to take.
Mozilla is turning into the same thing every other big corporations are, including Google. Inflated executive numbers and pay, cutting what made then unique (think of all the FOSS stuff they’ve killed along the way)…
I’m not jumping to Vivaldi or whatever just yet, but ugh… Their latest push for AI is driving me very close…
Still doesn’t make sense. One company is turning to AI so that drives you to other companies that already have AI and are precedentally worse?
I’m not saying Mozilla is a saint. The sooner we can replace the executive branch, the better. But the even better comparative is if somehow we don’t even need to get to that point in the first place, and not supporting Mozilla at the past edge of where they’re at is defo not gonna lead to that.
When the ladybird browser is just around the corner? Give it some time.
Aren’t the devs persona non grata for some reason or another?
In all objectivity, this seems like the most rational thing to do.
Now that you can have good translation by AI, why would anyone want to waste their time on localization?
As a translator, I have to say machine translations are really good if you just want to get the gist of things. If all you want is to understand 90% of what’s written and you can live with the margin of error, then I’m not gonna try to convince you to hire me.
But if you need to understand 99.9% then a human is required because a machine just will not understand the nuance or have a larger context unless instructed. Localizing is another issue too, you’ll have to take into consideration the cultural nuance of the target language. Localizing software is even more niche because you’re often limited in character count for the source language which machines often misunderstand, and the same limitation for the target language that a machine may not account for.
tl;dr - hire me if you want good localization
Now that you can have good translation by AI,
I see the bots are commenting on lemmy.
The main issue, and this is also mentioned in the blog post, is that the bot only does translation and not localisation.
The first is just taking the words from one language and changing to another.
The second is to actually make sure the text in the new language makes proper sense. Maybe the English article uses some analogy that does realy make sense in the new language. Localisation is to find some other suitable analogy to use instead, so that the point from the main article is kept, but it still makes sense.
I do some volunteer work on localizing for Welsh and some Spanish. AI translations are hot garbage still even for the larger languages like Spanish. You can get a general idea of the intent most of the time, but that’s about it. It’s nowhere near good enough to replace humans with yet, definitely not good enough to overwrite what they’ve already translated.
I’ve never seen any machine translation that I would consider anywhere near good.
deepl.com (text translation) has been useful to me
It is good, specially on mid size text. But it is not good enough. When text is long or too short, it gets lost and makes tons of context mistakes. It also tends to be unnatural for the target language preferring original language phrasing.
I have to admit I’ve only ever used it to translate a paragraph or two at a time… where I was just looking for the gist of a text.
Not too surprising, considering that for centuries many people well-versed in two languages have made a very good living as translators … and often having to get delicate nuances across (for poets as well as statesmen). It’s as much art as science.
overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. I really don’t understand that! But then, there are truckloads of worthwhile texts from throughout history that will never see translations otherwise … so that’s a worthy cause. Over time it may be improved, IF the algos are given feedback that allows them to learn from mistakes.
