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.

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.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6326·
    2 days ago

    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)

    • chunes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      22 hours ago

      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?

    • 3abas@lemmy.worldEnglish
      347·
      2 days ago

      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?

      • h3rmit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        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.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        169·
        2 days ago

        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.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.worldEnglish
      311·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • Sv443@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        91·
        2 days ago

        not for the sake of “it”, for the sake of making money. they are competing with the most massive corporations with infinite money.

      • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        84·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • Lemminary@lemmy.worldEnglish
          72·
          2 days ago

          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.

          • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
            73·
            2 days ago

            standard approach with such a controversial feature

            The “controversial” features:

            1. Alt-text generation: Creates descriptions for images, which is particularly useful for making PDFs more accessible to screen readers.
            2. On-device translation: Translates web pages without sending your content to external servers, protecting your privacy.
            3. Smart tab groups: Analyzes open tabs to suggest names and group similar ones together to help with organization.
            4. Link previews: Generates key points from articles to give you a quick summary.

            These are all very modest in requirements even on an old phone. And the use is actually zero unless you use the function.
            AFAIK all further AI functionalities are all optional.

            Number one is particularly useful for blind people, a group that absolutely needs screen readers to work well.

            So again stop the bullshitting, just because you are bullshitting yourself too doesn’t make it better.
            Either that or mention just one single specific function you “needed” to disable and why.
            IMO your misunderstood whining is annoying.

            Personally I use the translation function a lot, it is both very handy and very good, and I have used it for both Russian and Ukrainian and Chinese, and it works surprisingly well.
            But maybe you speak every language on the planet, or find it more convenient to use an online translator, leaving unnecessary extra digital trails and requiring extra bandwidth?
            How you don’t find that feature useful is beyond me???

            • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
              14·
              1 day ago

              I rarely ever use translation features. I never visit sites which are in a language I don’t understand. 🤷‍♂️ So this would be nice if it were opt in, I guess.

              But I definitely have the processing power to run it. Buuut of course not everyone does.

              • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
                5·
                1 day ago

                this would be nice if it were opt in, I guess.

                It doesn’t do shit if you don’t use it, why would you want opt in for that?
                The same goes for the other features.

                • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  15·
                  1 day ago

                  Because on every machine where I open Firefox for the first time, I have to tell it not to translate my language. It’s a small dance I have to do every so often. Bit annoying, innit.

  • arararagi@ani.socialEnglish
    372·
    2 days ago

    Why would they override articles that were already done? Makes no fucking sense!

    • Hond@piefed.socialEnglish
      103·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • 0x0@lemmy.zipEnglish
    237·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • hubobes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    186·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • khaleer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      92·
      2 days ago

      Not terrible idea? Did you heard about ai japanase localization disaster?

      • hubobes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        41·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          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

    • Siru@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
    113·
    2 days ago

    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?

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    135·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
      51·
      2 days ago

      It is going to happen to all locales, not just Japan. The Japan locale leader was just a canary in the coalmine.

    • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      Servo and Ladybird are both worth keeping an eye on, but neither is even close to be ready yet, unfortunately

  • tabarnaski@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    548·
    3 days ago

    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?

    • fatalicus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • mushroommunk@lemmy.todayEnglish
      17·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • k0e3@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      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

        • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          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.

          • kalkulat@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            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.

    • 0x0@lemmy.zipEnglish
      81·
      2 days ago

      Now that you can have good translation by AI,

      I see the bots are commenting on lemmy.

  • Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1038·
    3 days ago

    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.

      • Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        22·
        2 days ago

        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…

        • Venia Silente@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          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.

      • Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        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…