Thank Mozilla for Killing Localization on Support Mozilla (And Replacing Human Contributions With AI Bots)

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨yoasif@fedia.io⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/11/27/thank-mozilla-for-killing-localization-on-support-mozilla-and-replacing-human-contributions-with-AI-bots.html

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 ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- KickMeElmo@sopuli.xyz ⁨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.
  
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- Mikina@programming.dev ⁨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.
  
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- BD89@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - shiroininja@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    There’s AI in Firefox? I’m running it as new as I can in Arch and have never seen a hint of it.
    
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- yoasif@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah, I am astroturfing. It can't be that I actually believed Mozilla when they said that localizers were heroic.
  
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- hummingbird@lemmy.world ⁨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.
  
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- Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨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.
  
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- Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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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  - tyler@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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
    
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- boonhet@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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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  - vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Oh. Thank you for reminding me of my shame.
    
    I switched every relative to Chrome before myself switching to Opera Presto.
    
    Did the damage and didn’t even dogfood it.
    
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- vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨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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- Engywuck@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Lol, bashing that shitty corp is a civic duty. Fuck Mozilla.
  
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  - pr0sp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- kilgore_trout@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  But this is not about Firefox delelopment, but about community getting overthrown for apparently no reason.
  
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- pr0sp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This is bullshit. Brave literally have a webpage mentioning their shit. You are trying to gaslight us all.
  
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- Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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 😅
  
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- ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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!!

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- 3abas@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?
  
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  - Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yes they are, because I bet this 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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  - h3rmit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
    
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- Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
  
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  - Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 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.
    
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  - Sv443@sh.itjust.works ⁨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.
    
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- headset@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Your point could have been made without using an ableist slur.
    
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  - FG_3479@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I hate them both. Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium are the true private and non-profit browsers. Firefox and Brave are full of bloat like Firefox’s ads and tracking and Brave’s Wallet, News, Talk, VPN etc
    
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- chunes@lemmy.world ⁨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?
  
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Kissaki@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- Hond@piefed.social ⁨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.
  
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arararagi@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Why would they override articles that were already done? Makes no fucking sense!

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- Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  They won’t, it’s a stupid blog that is making shit up.
  
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- Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Try to make AI useful, of course.
  
  Mozilla is funded mostly by Google
  
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  - kilgore_trout@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    This doesn’t have anything to do with Google. It’s just Mozilla being overrun by hipsters.
    
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hubobes@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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- khaleer@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Not terrible idea? Did you heard about ai japanase localization disaster?
  
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  - hubobes@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
    
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- __siru__@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
  
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0x0@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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- jazzkoalapaws@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It’s just going to line the pockets of executives.
  
  They have the money. They choose not to spend it.
  
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Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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- veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Looking at the situation and deciding that prefering Chrome would be better is exactly the bot position to take.
  
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  - Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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…
    
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- noretus@crazypeople.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  No, do not give into Chromium. Letting Google dominate web rendering standards is a bigger problem.
  
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  - Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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…
    
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- HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  When the ladybird browser is just around the corner? Give it some time.
  
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  - 0x0@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Aren’t the devs persona non grata for some reason or another?
    
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Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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- yoasif@fedia.io ⁨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.
  
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phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?

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- demonsword@lemmy.world ⁨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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- __siru__@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You can try to help fund ladybird maybe? But it is still in development.
  
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  - luciferofastora@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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).
    
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  - Qwel@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    If you’re going to fund something, go for Servo
    
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tabarnaski@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?

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- fatalicus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
  
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nabehokan@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Take a look at servo (servo.org). Not anywhere close to being a robust browser but still something to be excited about.

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cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
i wish vivaldi would switch to gecko tbh (preferably pre quantum gecko)

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hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
No matter what you think of Eich. The Eich era of Firefox/Mozilla was their golden years. I miss them.

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