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Regardless of user count, adopting EME was a terrible move for Firefox. Does this mean that whatever terrible idea corporations push, Firefox must adopt? I'm gl
by apostacy 8y ago
Regardless of user count, adopting EME was a terrible move for Firefox. Does this mean that whatever terrible idea corporations push, Firefox must adopt? I'm glad that Firefox used to simply not implement things that were not a good idea.
And in the long term, I think that by legitimizing DRM like they have, they will still be at a disadvantage, because they've helped give the green light to this class of technologies, where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage.
The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have. Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser. It would frankly be better if they just used Chrome. Mozilla's vain obsession with their brand and with being popular with people who don't care is frankly toxic to them.
We need to stop using the term marketshare when talking about Firefox, because that implies that there is a market, and there isn't. There might be differing levels of usage between browsers, but comparing usage of Firefox to Chrome or Safari is apples and oranges, because Mozilla's goal is not to open an app store and build a monopolistic for-profit closed platform, as Google and Apple's are. And I think that this pseudo-capitalist mentality is causing them to overcompensate in harmful ways.
Imagine if other staples of OSS started acting this way (some of them already do). Imagine if Ubuntu adopted a Microsoft-style forced updates model. I could honestly see them doing that.
And I bring this up in many of my comments, but I'm so glad that when Firefox first came out, they didn't worship at the feet of Microsoft and try to emulate IE6 the way that they worship at the feet of Google. I'm glad that a decade ago they didn't consider themselves failures because they couldn't win over the AOL users.
> Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares.
Yes, exactly. I think DRM is conceptually incompatible with an open web browsing ecosystem, so of course it should require ugly hacks to pull off. If a company wants to introduce closed and hostile code to their users, they should be on their own. It is not our job to facilitate them doing bad things.
> Mozilla's biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time.
That's highly subjective and I strongly disagree. Chrome's UX is AWFUL. It is constantly doing things behind my back, and I can never rely on it for anything. And thanks to Chrome popularizing forced destructive updates, interfaces have become very unstable, and you cannot rely on a feature in your browser even being there when you wake up in the morning. It could just be silently erased.
Their app store is so terrible and filled with so many misleading low quality or outright hostile extensions it is barely useful. And even if they were better, I couldn't rely on them not dissapearing.
Soon, we won't have address bars and URLs will mostly be used for internal use. Ads will be rendered server-side and stitched into content. Our computers will be completely out of our control and run whatever code Google feels like. And Chrome will be an accomplice.
We are truly entering a dark age of technology.
- CorpusCalcium 8y ago>legitimizing DRM like they have By this logic they had already long legitimized it through their grudging support for Flash. But don't let that stop you from trying to act like it's magically different. >where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage They were always at a disadvantage in the fight against DRM. They never had any real control over it to begin with, and had to constantly be at a disadvantage while it was Flash-based. The fact that they adopted EME changes nothing at all, except that some people on the Internet took it personally because they wanted to. >the way that they worship at the feet of Google Suuuure they do. Just like they worshiped at the feet of Yahoo before. >The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have Some hard evidence for this shift in their mentality would sure be nice. Simply owning a corporation doesn't mean you're suddenly driven by a profit motive. Nor does the fact that you may earn some revenue from things that some people love to hate. >Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser. They have always been a business. A non-profit organization is legally a type of business. And even by non-legal definitions they are still a business. A business does not mean "a profit-driven venture". Just like their mission has always been to make products for everyone, whether or not they happen to hold strong beliefs about privacy or DRM or even web browsers. >We are truly entering a dark age of technology. I've been hearing that since I was just a kid. I'm sorry that Mozilla didn't win your DRM war for you (and me), but that doesn't mean they've given up on all attempts to avert your "dark age" prophecy. But they're just a couple of thousand people. They won't be able to avert every disaster.