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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

> Still impressive. It works pretty well and without that cloud that Google likes to tell us we really need.

This is still using Google's cloud to host the models and your browser has to repeatedly download them on demand. We shouldn't need to depend on Google at all, but with Firefox Translations we still do and they're still collecting data about us.

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I think this comment is the prime example of Firefox being unable to do an objectively and unqualified Good Thing without a million people showering hate into the comments.

You'd need a million examples for that. Not just a prime example.

It's not just that I have high expectations of firefox, they claim to have high expectations of themselves. They heavily market themselves as being privacy friendly and often they have been, but they aren't always.

In this case, I agree that this is, largely, a "Good Thing" although not unqualified since some number of users who wouldn't have otherwise will end up repeatedly sending data to Google, probably without even being aware of it. The data they'd give up is (to me at least) small compared to the data they would have been surrendering to online translation services, but that's not really the point.

It just don't understand how they stared from "Protect your privacy from sites like translate.google.com by using this add-on to translate webpages locally!" and ended up at "Let's make firefox users connect to Google's servers every time they use this feature!" If you're creating a product designed for people concerned about their privacy, it should beyond obvious that making your users send data to Google is a problem.

It's not like they couldn't host those files themselves at mozilla.org or (as others have pointed out) just keep them locally and avoid making a bunch of unnecessary connections to a remote host entirely. If they'd done that it would also allow Firefox Translations to work when you aren't connected to the internet.

It's really not hate though. It's love and concern. I love Firefox, and I want it to do better!

>It just don't understand how they stared from "Protect your privacy from sites like translate.google.com by using this add-on to translate webpages locally!" and ended up at "Let's make firefox users connect to Google's servers every time they use this feature!" If you're creating a product designed for people concerned about their privacy, it should beyond obvious that making your users send data to Google is a problem.

Don't you think that except for the PII data which shouldn't be used for training at all those (training) datasets can be stored at any place and it does not make a difference from the privacy point of view? Or I wrongly interpret their purpose...

> or (as others have pointed out) just keep them locally and avoid making a bunch of unnecessary connections to a remote host entirely

I've been using this extension for many months now and that's exactly how it already works. You're just plain wrong.

What autoexec said was almost entirely factual and does not qualify remotely as "hate".

Criticism != hate

Models are downloaded only once and then cached, and not repeatedly like the OP mentioned. Source: Me. I've developed it. If you disagree, are seeing a different behavior or have further questions, please reach out in the repo: github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations/

Thanks once for the response, and eleventy times for actually developing a non-cloud translation thingy. As for the caching thing I was really hoping this was the case so I guess that makes it three.

Good to know! I still hope you can find a better place to host the files, but it's nice knowing the problem only happens once per file (so long as the cache remains anyway)

Why on earth would they build it that way? If it’s small enough to download on demand it’s certainly small enough to cache locally.

My experience is that the language-pair packs are downloaded on demand once, not "repeatedly".

You are correct, models are downloaded only once and then cached.

Yeah they should just use another cloud to serve the files. Using your main competitor is really disingenous, because they can glance all kinds of usage data from it (if not more)

I'm not sure why this is done because this kind of filehosting is easily replaced by something more privacy-friendly.

> your browser has to repeatedly download them on demand.

Mine downloaded it once, didn't notice it happening after that.

You are right in your statement: the models are downloaded only once and cached. If that's not the case for some users, it should be filed as an issue

But what about updates? I assume they need to be updated once in a while?

We retrain models as we get new datasets and only if they improve, which is not common. So far we haven't updated any model. When it's time, then yes, they will be updated, but it's definitely not a frequent process.

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