TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.
It’s too late to give (life) support. Web browsers are a dying ecosystem as it’s too complex to create competition. Why not abandon them and instead support software that does a seperatable part of what modern browsers do?
HTML is old and weird and its browsers have a bad ecosystem. The way to go would be to ignore xkcd 927 and make a new standard and a pilot browser for it. The hard part would be getting people to use it.
I don’t necessarily disagree on the complexity point, but I don’t think breaking up the functionality of a web browser fixes the issue.
Web browsers are one of those basic tools everyone who uses a computer relies upon. Breaking that up would not only lead to user frustration, I think it’d introduce brand new territories bad actors like Google could monopolize. Now that unified “web browsers” exist it’s incredibly difficult to ask users to stop using them. It turns from “download this program” to “download these four or five separate programs and follow this guide to learn how to daisy chain them together into a browser equivalent.”. That’s a reasonable ask for some people. Hell, it’s a reasonable ask for me frankly. But your average user isn’t going to have the time nor the patience to attempt to make that solution work.
Lets all go back to Gopher.
I am 100% ready to replace my browser with a blend of Usenet/RSS subscriptions, maybe sprinkle some Gemini (not the G*gle AI) atop of it. Fuck it, I might even get a library card for shits and giggles.
Man I collect library cards. At this point I’m a member of three different library systems. No joke, libraries are amazing and one of the best resources we’ve got left in this country. Go get a card man!