5 ms·

Why would you prefer letting streaming companies have full code execution on you desktop instead of having browsers mediate?

zanny 10y ago
I wouldn't, and they knew that. They knew the adoption rates for out-of-browser proprietary content viewers were awful. That is why they dedicated resources to usurp the open web. If Mozilla had fought back, we might have progressed towards the death of the obsolete content model big media wants to keep in place and prevent change in the market. It would have at least been a step in the right direction - instead, the promise of the open Internet was sabotaged, and big media gets to be more "convenient" at its sacrifice.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  Or more realistically, if Mozilla had fought back, more people would simply have stopped using Firefox.
  - problems 10y ago
    Yeah, the problem started when people decided installing a browser from an ad agency seemed like a good idea.
    - marcoperaza 10y ago
      Why is reasonable DRM a problem in the first place? I'm paying Netflix $8 a month to watch thousands of movies whenever I want. Being constrained to a large number of devices that take some steps to prevent someone from ripping the movies is a fair tradeoff. It works flawlessly on my computer, on my phone, and on my xbox. The DRM hasn't bothered me once.
      - zanny 10y ago
        Because I'm going to immediately argue with you that there is no reasonable DRM. It comes from two ideological positions. One believes that content creators need complete systemic control of what they make - at all costs (that the creator maintains full control no matter how the content is interacted with) - and the other is that content shouldn't be controlled (or that I, as a buyer of content, should control the content I bought), and all real world implementations fall between those extremes. But when it comes to DRM, it should be understandable that plenty of people (myself included) are not willing to allow third party companies to run proprietary code (the drm) on my hardware for the exclusive purpose of preventing me from interacting with data on my own computer (the streamed movie / music). When web browsers start baking in this proprietary functionality, it forces me to look for alternatives to the established open source browsers. If you are content with that relationship with content (heh) providers, then this is not your fight. But at least accept that a lot of us want to own our computers, and proprietary software takes away that right, and DRM is just one of the more visceral forms proprietary software takes where its entire purpose is to impede the users ability to control their computers.
        usrusr 10y ago
        So, install a DRM-free browser on your universal computer and get a dedicated box for the subscription service? Except for perfectly avoidable waste, what did I miss?
        jasonkostempski 10y ago
        The problem is, eventually, no one is going to make an DRM-free browser because "no one" will use it if they can't watch movies or access whatever other content will be locked down with EME. Firefox let's you easily disable DRM, for now, I have no faith it will remain that way forever. If content providers were really never going to give up on DRM requirements, I think a standardized "Media Browser" specification should have been created with the only goal being audio/video delivery, completely separate from web standards. I don't even understand why Netflix wants to be under the thumb of the major browsers, they should be the one's looking for a dedicated solution so they can declare independence.
    - Razengan 10y ago
      Does anyone remember what the prevailing mood was like when/before Chrome started becoming popular? Were people simply happy to see more companies putting a dent in that avatar of Lovecraftian horrors that was Internet Explorer? Why didn't Mozilla work harder to catch up with Chrome and counter Google? Was it a case of "My enemy's enemy is my friend?" And why did Opera slip away into the mists of obscurity? I remember it being pretty good and it was actually my main browser for a year or so.
      - problems 10y ago
        > Why didn't Mozilla work harder to catch up with Chrome and counter Google? Was it a case of "My enemy's enemy is my friend?" I'd argue that this "catching up to Google" was more their problem than their solution. In making Firefox more and more Chrome-like they took away many unique and important Firefox features and they keep moving further and further in that direction. They now want to trash XUL and move to an extension framework that exactly matches Chrome's, removing the deep flexibility and customization that Firefox users have enjoyed. Several of my favorite extension authors have already announced they're giving up when that change happens. If your browser just plays catch up without differentiating itself in any significant way, why would anyone use it? Mozilla came up with some cool UI ideas, but never implemented them, or quickly did so, got them to a tiny percentage of their full potential and then abandoned them. That's the kind of thing they should be focusing on - that's the kind of thing that made Firefox gain market share in the first place. Instead they keep playing catch up. And playing catch up with a massive codebase against a giant company is incredibly hard. Right now Brave is doing a better job differentiating itself and it's built on top of Electron - on Chrome's core codebase. If it were a little more active I think it'd have a shot at something.
- kibwen 10y ago
  Mozilla did fight back, but nobody in the OSS community at large bothered to care about EME until the writing was already on the wall. I remember being at the Mozilla Summit 2013 discussing Mozilla's alternative proposals, but even by then the prevailing mood was that of imminent despair at the inevitable.
  - rtpg 10y ago
    out of curiosity, what alternative proposals were offered?
    - kibwen 10y ago
      AFAIR the alternative with the most promise involved implementing a new video codec in JS (heavily leveraging the GPU and the then-nascent asm.js) with first-class support for digital watermarking, then convincing studios that per-user watermarking was more effective than DRM. You can see the difficulty of Mozilla's position: it wasn't enough to come up with an alternative to EME, they had to come up with an alternative to DRM altogether. A tough sell, to say the least, and basically DOA because Chrome and IE were shipping EME for use with Netflix in 2012.
jasonkostempski 10y ago
That's a good reason. Ideally sand-boxing desktop applications will be an easy thing to do in the future. Maybe the big companies involved in making this Netflix thing happen could have spent their time coming up with a cross platform standard for that. No matter what, the open internet's more important than me or you or even Morpheus. I make the trust call with desktop applications every day, I'd be ok with making the call for 1 or 2 more. I have DRM turned off in Firefox and I won't change it for Netflix or Hulu (the only 2 sites for me that don't work with it off), I limit Netflix and Hulu use to Roku.

zanny 10y ago

I wouldn't, and they knew that. They knew the adoption rates for out-of-browser proprietary content viewers were awful. That is why they dedicated resources to usurp the open web. If Mozilla had fought back, we might have progressed towards the death of the obsolete content model big media wants to keep in place and prevent change in the market. It would have at least been a step in the right direction - instead, the promise of the open Internet was sabotaged, and big media gets to be more "convenient" at its sacrifice.

marcoperaza 10y ago
Or more realistically, if Mozilla had fought back, more people would simply have stopped using Firefox.
- problems 10y ago
  Yeah, the problem started when people decided installing a browser from an ad agency seemed like a good idea.
  - marcoperaza 10y ago
    Why is reasonable DRM a problem in the first place? I'm paying Netflix $8 a month to watch thousands of movies whenever I want. Being constrained to a large number of devices that take some steps to prevent someone from ripping the movies is a fair tradeoff. It works flawlessly on my computer, on my phone, and on my xbox. The DRM hasn't bothered me once.
    - zanny 10y ago
      Because I'm going to immediately argue with you that there is no reasonable DRM. It comes from two ideological positions. One believes that content creators need complete systemic control of what they make - at all costs (that the creator maintains full control no matter how the content is interacted with) - and the other is that content shouldn't be controlled (or that I, as a buyer of content, should control the content I bought), and all real world implementations fall between those extremes. But when it comes to DRM, it should be understandable that plenty of people (myself included) are not willing to allow third party companies to run proprietary code (the drm) on my hardware for the exclusive purpose of preventing me from interacting with data on my own computer (the streamed movie / music). When web browsers start baking in this proprietary functionality, it forces me to look for alternatives to the established open source browsers. If you are content with that relationship with content (heh) providers, then this is not your fight. But at least accept that a lot of us want to own our computers, and proprietary software takes away that right, and DRM is just one of the more visceral forms proprietary software takes where its entire purpose is to impede the users ability to control their computers.
      - usrusr 10y ago
        So, install a DRM-free browser on your universal computer and get a dedicated box for the subscription service? Except for perfectly avoidable waste, what did I miss?
        jasonkostempski 10y ago
        The problem is, eventually, no one is going to make an DRM-free browser because "no one" will use it if they can't watch movies or access whatever other content will be locked down with EME. Firefox let's you easily disable DRM, for now, I have no faith it will remain that way forever. If content providers were really never going to give up on DRM requirements, I think a standardized "Media Browser" specification should have been created with the only goal being audio/video delivery, completely separate from web standards. I don't even understand why Netflix wants to be under the thumb of the major browsers, they should be the one's looking for a dedicated solution so they can declare independence.
  - Razengan 10y ago
    Does anyone remember what the prevailing mood was like when/before Chrome started becoming popular? Were people simply happy to see more companies putting a dent in that avatar of Lovecraftian horrors that was Internet Explorer? Why didn't Mozilla work harder to catch up with Chrome and counter Google? Was it a case of "My enemy's enemy is my friend?" And why did Opera slip away into the mists of obscurity? I remember it being pretty good and it was actually my main browser for a year or so.
    - problems 10y ago
      > Why didn't Mozilla work harder to catch up with Chrome and counter Google? Was it a case of "My enemy's enemy is my friend?" I'd argue that this "catching up to Google" was more their problem than their solution. In making Firefox more and more Chrome-like they took away many unique and important Firefox features and they keep moving further and further in that direction. They now want to trash XUL and move to an extension framework that exactly matches Chrome's, removing the deep flexibility and customization that Firefox users have enjoyed. Several of my favorite extension authors have already announced they're giving up when that change happens. If your browser just plays catch up without differentiating itself in any significant way, why would anyone use it? Mozilla came up with some cool UI ideas, but never implemented them, or quickly did so, got them to a tiny percentage of their full potential and then abandoned them. That's the kind of thing they should be focusing on - that's the kind of thing that made Firefox gain market share in the first place. Instead they keep playing catch up. And playing catch up with a massive codebase against a giant company is incredibly hard. Right now Brave is doing a better job differentiating itself and it's built on top of Electron - on Chrome's core codebase. If it were a little more active I think it'd have a shot at something.
kibwen 10y ago
Mozilla did fight back, but nobody in the OSS community at large bothered to care about EME until the writing was already on the wall. I remember being at the Mozilla Summit 2013 discussing Mozilla's alternative proposals, but even by then the prevailing mood was that of imminent despair at the inevitable.
- rtpg 10y ago
  out of curiosity, what alternative proposals were offered?
  - kibwen 10y ago
    AFAIR the alternative with the most promise involved implementing a new video codec in JS (heavily leveraging the GPU and the then-nascent asm.js) with first-class support for digital watermarking, then convincing studios that per-user watermarking was more effective than DRM. You can see the difficulty of Mozilla's position: it wasn't enough to come up with an alternative to EME, they had to come up with an alternative to DRM altogether. A tough sell, to say the least, and basically DOA because Chrome and IE were shipping EME for use with Netflix in 2012.

jasonkostempski 10y ago

That's a good reason. Ideally sand-boxing desktop applications will be an easy thing to do in the future. Maybe the big companies involved in making this Netflix thing happen could have spent their time coming up with a cross platform standard for that. No matter what, the open internet's more important than me or you or even Morpheus. I make the trust call with desktop applications every day, I'd be ok with making the call for 1 or 2 more. I have DRM turned off in Firefox and I won't change it for Netflix or Hulu (the only 2 sites for me that don't work with it off), I limit Netflix and Hulu use to Roku.