this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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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)
Because everyone here uses it. What else are they going to complain about?
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.
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.
You can't tell if this one is baseless or not?
Your source is a blog with a stupid anecdote from Japan as its main feature. Why should I take that seriously?
Why did Mozilla staff take it seriously enough to immediately offer to get on a call with the writer of the stupid anecdote?
Because Mozilla isn't the scumbag company the blog tries to paint them as.
So we should take it seriously.
Thanks for clarifying!
"I hear yoasif is always trying to fuck the neighbor's dog."
"No, that's stupid, of course I'm not."
"Oh so you're acknowledging it? Guess that means we should take the claim seriously!"
🙄
Ngl, I haven't read the article, I'm not defending or talking about Mozilla. But holy shit was that stupid logic.
The reason it works is because Mozilla staff isn't going to offer to call any random person with a "stupid anecdote".
EDIT: FWIW, your logic is broken: while your imagined yoasif denies the claim, that differs from what Baffalox does in reality - they say "yes, but". Imagined yoasif just said "no."
Wouldn't have been critical of the form of your logic, but I mean -- you said my logic was stupid. I'm not sure you understood my logic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The "controversial" features:
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???
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't translate anything automatically, you have to choose translation manually for a site in a foreign language. It ALWAYS shows the original first.
So that's complete and utter made up bullshit.
I know that, but I don't even want the suggestion, is what I mean. You know?
Listen man, take it easy alright? I understand your stance, relax. Not trying to argue with your or get aggressive here. 🤝 We're cool. I'm on your side, I love Firefox.
Your point could have been made without using an ableist slur.
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