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.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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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.
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.
Yeah, I am astroturfing. It can't be that I actually believed Mozilla when they said that localizers were heroic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But this is not about Firefox delelopment, but about community getting overthrown for apparently no reason.
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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
This doesn't have anything to do with Google. It's just Mozilla being overrun by hipsters.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
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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.
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!!
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.
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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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.
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