this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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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.

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[–] tyler@programming.dev 110 points 2 weeks ago (16 children)

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.

[–] KickMeElmo@sopuli.xyz 107 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 66 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 34 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] shiroininja@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

There’s AI in Firefox? I’m running it as new as I can in Arch and have never seen a hint of it.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] shiroininja@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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[–] greybeard@feddit.online 7 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] yoasif@fedia.io 19 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, I am astroturfing. It can't be that I actually believed Mozilla when they said that localizers were heroic.

[–] hummingbird@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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[–] Kissaki@feddit.org 53 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Hond@piefed.social 8 points 2 weeks 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.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 40 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

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)

[–] 3abas@lemmy.world 34 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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?

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (7 children)

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.

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[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 32 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.works 8 points 2 weeks 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.world 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.world 6 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] chunes@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks 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?

[–] arararagi@ani.social 37 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

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

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[–] 0x0@lemmy.zip 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] jazzkoalapaws@ttrpg.network 9 points 2 weeks ago

It's just going to line the pockets of executives.

They have the money. They choose not to spend it.

[–] hubobes@sh.itjust.works 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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.xyz 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.io 5 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

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?

[–] demonsword@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago

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

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