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.
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 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
They won’t, it’s a stupid blog that is making shit up.
No matter what you think of Eich. The Eich era of Firefox/Mozilla was their golden years. I miss them.
Eich was a failure. He sat on e10s for years while Chrome continued gaining marketshare. The path to monetization is something he says he wanted to do at Mozilla but did at Brave instead.
At Brave, he started with a Gecko offshoot but couldn’t make it work and retreated to Chromium.
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.
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
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.
Take a look at servo (https://servo.org/). Not anywhere close to being a robust browser but still something to be excited about.
Servo and Ladybird are both worth keeping an eye on, but neither is even close to be ready yet, unfortunately
i wish vivaldi would switch to gecko tbh (preferably pre quantum gecko)
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!! (everybody who upvoted this trash blog)
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?
I have worked both as a professional translator in works not related to software and as a software developer, and also have participaded on open source public project translated by the community with weblate.
There is NO WAY at all that the AI translations are worse. DeepL has been powering your human translators pretty much since it released, and LLMs are way better at translating than the average Joe.
Most of those weblate managed translations I mentioned were absolute dogshit. Done by humans, done with passion and good intention (most of the time, some of the languages we did know less about had stuff that had nothing to do with the original texts).
Like, people assume since they speak a language that they are able to translate that language and that is not true.
Unless Mozilla had full time, proper translators working, the quality con only increase by using AI.
And if they did, they can sack most of the team, leave one per language, and have them review the translations, and they would save massive amounts of money. And like it or not, open source needs money to run.
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.The AI bullshit features as you call them are completely non invasive,
And yet I had to turn them off in
about:config, not even in the regular settings. Why are the settings hidden? Why can’t I turn them on if I want them? Why isn’t opt-in and transparency their standard approach with such a controversial feature? Those are some serious dark patterns for a company advertising itself as user-friendly, that they had to backtrack on when they saw the community uproar.Now it’s happening again, but on the developer side.
Stop the bullshitting and complaining over things are completely irrelevant
Irrelevant? I can’t afford AI threads running in the background, hogging my memory and processing power away from my productivity apps for whatever bullshit they decide to add that barely relates to what I use a browser for. I don’t live in a “first-world country” with standard hardware. That’s the whole reason I use Firefox, for the respect for their users that I have grown accustomed to, which they now seem to want to ignore. It’s a huge violation of trust that you’re downplaying when they want to add things first and apologize later.
The bottom line is that their approach has shifted recently, and I have every right to criticize them for it when they say one thing and do another.
Why the fuck is lemmy so chuck full of anti Fiirefox and anti Mozilla propaganda?
Because everyone here uses it. What else are they going to complain about?
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.
Looking at the situation and deciding that prefering Chrome would be better is exactly the bot position to take.
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.
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?
You can try to help fund ladybird maybe? But it is still 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).
If you’re going to fund something, go for Servo
Also very much in development
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?
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
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.
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.
Its not astroturfing, it’s that people have expectations of them beyond just being a browser that let’s you access the web.
Frankly its not that great of a browser (its serviceable. And I use it, or a derivative, pretty much exclusively); generally the reason you use it is because you care about abstract things like not supporting the chromium monopoly, or wanting to pick the project managed with the most care for how it will impact actual humans
And Mozilla has been making kinda crummy choices with respects to those abstract values more and more regularly it feels like 😅
Like I really wanna love and support Mozilla. I’m using their browser cause I think its the best choice by the metrics that are important to me. And more and more I just feel kinda exhausted and kinda frustrated with them 😅
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.
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.
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.
This is a pretty good summary of the problem.
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.
What dumb reasoning. Posting anti Mozilla articles only serves to push all of Firefox users to other even less used browsers. See the whole terms of service thing where someone posted an article just like this that was factually incorrect. Many users didn’t bother to research it and stopped using Firefox. Ff didn’t grow, it shrunk and with it every single downstream browser also will suffer because they’re forked from FF
Yeah, I am astroturfing. It can’t be that I actually believed Mozilla when they said that localizers were heroic.
Dear Rust developer,
Not every critique of a technology you like is “FUD”. In fact, crypto-bros and AI-bros also made the term “FUD” meaningless.
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.
