Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet.
New content and projects
What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop
Last month you may have seen “Firefox Labs” while translating in the Firefox project. In the coming months a number of new experimental features are being made available in Firefox through Firefox Labs, allowing users to test out and provide feedback (through Mozilla connect) on in-development features. You will be able to turn those features on and off by navigating to your about:settings page and clicking ”Firefox Labs.” You can test it out yourself in Nightly right now.
Starting from the upcoming Firefox version 131 you should start seeing strings to localize for a number of new experimental features.
AI Chatbot
You may have noticed this feature in the current version of Nightly already. With this enabled, you can add AI chatbots such as ChatGPT to the sidebar. When added, users can also select text on a page and use the context menu to choose a pre-generated prompt. This feature is being opened for localization in version 131, and in addition to the regular UI strings you would expect, the prompts for sending to the chatbot will also be available to localize.
Localizing chatbot prompts
You can localize these prompts as usual, but you may want to test potential prompts out to see the quality of the results returned and tweak if necessary. Please find some additional background information from the development team to help you when localizing these:
Starting with Firefox version 130, users can choose to add an AI chatbot to their browser. This feature will be added to the Settings > Firefox Labs page, where interested users can choose to try it out. The chatbots users can choose from: Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Hugging Chat, Le Chat Mistral.
In addition to having the chatbot in the sidebar, when users select text on a webpage, we will suggest several actions the user can ask the chatbot to perform. Selecting an action sends the selection, the page title, and a prompt that we have written to the chatbot provider.
Prompts are the plain language ‘instructions’ for the chatbot and will be visible in the provider’s interface.
About our prompts
This table lists the actions, their purpose, and the prompt.
Action Purpose Prompt Summarize Help users understand what a selection covers at a glance Please summarize the selection using precise and concise language. Use headers and bulleted lists in the summary, to make it scannable. Maintain the meaning and factual accuracy. Explain this Help users understand unfamiliar words and topics Please explain the key concepts in this selection, using simple words. Also, use examples. Simplify language Make a selection easier to read Please rewrite the selection using short sentences and simple words. Maintain the meaning and factual accuracy. Quiz me Test understanding of selection in an interactive way Please quiz me on this selection. Ask me a variety of types of questions, for example multiple choice, true or false, and short answer. Wait for my response before moving on to the next question Writing style of prompts
In English, we have made the prompts concise and direct for a few reasons:
Some providers have character restrictions around how much can be input into their chat interface (the ‘context window’). The length of the prompt plus the length of the selection are included in this character count.
Being direct provides less room for misinterpretation of the instructions.
When localizing, please strive also for being concise and direct, but not at the expense of losing meaning. We understand this style may feel more “formal” than some of our other strings.
Sidebar customization / Vertical tabs
In addition to the AI chatbot mentioned above, more changes to the sidebar are in the works including the addition of vertical tabs. Keep your eye out for this experiment and associated strings coming in 131.
Upcoming features
In addition to the experiments planned for 131, there are more new features we can look forward to in later versions. Currently in active development are features related to profile management as well as creation of encrypted backups of your Firefox data.
What’s new or coming up in mobile
Firefox for Android has two exciting new features, and we’d love your help testing them out! Please use the Nightly version in both cases (which is the version you should be using anyways in order to test your localization work).
The first one is the Translation feature, which you can access by navigating to any website, and then going to Settings > Translate page. Play around with the feature, for example you can translate a page from English to French, and then from French to another language you may speak.
If you encounter any problems whatsoever, please file a bug here, under the Component “Translations”. Under “Type”, chose “Defect”.
Secondly, there is an entire toolbar menu redesign! This is not available by default on Nightly yet, so you will have to enable it through Secret Settings. To do so, go to Settings > About Firefox Nightly, and click 5 times on the Firefox Nightly logo. This will enable the Secret Settings, which you can access by clicking on the back arrow (which brings you back to Settings). Scroll down until you see “Secret Settings”. Then select both “Enable Navigation Toolbar” and “Enable Menu Redesign”. You’ll immediately notice the difference once you navigate via the bottom toolbar.
Please play around with this new feature as much as possible in your language – look out especially for truncations, as we expect to see quite a few.
If you encounter any problems whatsoever, please file a bug here, under the Component “Toolbar”. Under “Type”, chose “Defect”.
Firefox for iOS is expected to incorporate these changes in the future; however, that work has not started yet.
What’s new or coming up in SUMO
The next community call is coming up on August 7, 2024. We’ll talk about what’s coming in Firefox 129 as well as have a discussion with the lead editor of the IRL podcast to talk about their next season, “AI and Me.” Join us on Wednesday, August 7, 5pm UTC!
If you want to get updated on the upcoming Firefox release, check out our release wiki page for Firefox 129 to stay updated with known issues/dot releases. We’ve been doing this since Firefox 126 and it’s pretty well-received by the community.
Recently, we also teamed up with the Firefox team to organize the Firefox third-party installer campaign. As a result, we received 1,844 reports in total, identified 683 unique third-party websites and 105 unique download links. The Firefox team is currently conducting further investigations with the QA team based on these reports.
Apart from that, check out the contributor spotlight content that we published recently, and learn more about what we’ve done in Q2 from this blog post.
Events
This month we hosted Erik Nordin, Marco Castelluccio, and Greg Tatum from the Firefox Translations team for a virtual interview. We covered topics such as how the Firefox translation feature works, privacy features, incorporating LLMs and AI, and more. The stream recording will be available to view at any time. You can watch the recording on Air Mozilla or YouTube.
Please provide your feedback on this event through this form so we can make our future events even better!
In June we also hosted a Pontoon demo, which covers all the basic functionality you’ll need to get started translating on Pontoon, plus handy tips and tricks to help you get the most out of this easy to use tool.
Come check out all our event videos here!
Want to showcase an event coming up that your community is participating in? Contact us and we’ll include it.
Useful Links
- #l10n-community channel on Element (chat.mozilla.org)
- Localization category on Discourse
- L10n blog
Questions? Want to get involved?
If you want to get involved, or have any question about l10n, reach out to:
- Francesco Lodolo (flod) – Engineering Manager
- Bryan – l10n Project Manager
- Delphine – l10n Project Manager for mobile
- Peiying (CocoMo) – l10n Project Manager for mozilla.org, marketing, and legal
- Francis – l10n Project Manager for Common Voice, Mozilla Foundation
- Théo Chevalier – l10n Project Manager for Mozilla Foundation
- Matjaž (mathjazz) – Pontoon dev
- Eemeli – Pontoon, Fluent dev
No comments yet
Post a comment