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> While I do believe there was genuine opposition to this move within the community, I think the real decision makers had already made up their minds and just m
by sgift 7y ago
> While I do believe there was genuine opposition to this move within the community, I think the real decision makers had already made up their minds and just made a show of "discussing" it. I feel they did it under pressure, and perhaps were even induced with promises of more revenue, from Google.
The problem with beliefs is that there is no option to disprove them. Mozilla said they fought against it, the people who were there say they did fight against it, you don't believe it and think it's some kind of "show" put up.
> All they had to do was ask Google (or any other company) to develop a browser plugin for Firefox and let the user decide if they wanted it (when a user encountered it on a site, produce a pop-up alerting the user to the plug-in required).
And what incentive would companies have had to do that? Firefox simply doesn't have the market share to force anyone to develop for them. Even worse, Google has every incentive to not do it and instead pop up a banner "hey, looks like your browser doesn't support YT, use Chrome". People who argue that Mozilla was wrong to accept the DRM blob never have a good answer for this and usually then end in "people would have seen that Mozilla is right and boycotted YT" or "who cares if Mozilla has only 1% market share, it's far more important to never make any compromise".
- webmobdev 7y ago> And what incentive would companies have had to do that? Firefox simply doesn't have the market share to force anyone to develop for them. - Firefox has enough of a marketshare that nobody ignores them. - If Google wouldn't, someone else would have. - The content providers (Netflix, Prime, Hulu etc.) would have forced them to do so. I don't buy these arguments. And the fact that Mozilla makes it opt-in by default shows that the Mozilla board is now more concerned about revenue from Google and squeezing it as much money from their product than actually improving it. I wish the Firefox developers had more voice.
- acdha 7y ago> Firefox simply doesn't have the market share to force anyone to develop for them. Even worse, Google has every incentive to not do it and instead pop up a banner "hey, looks like your browser doesn't support YT, use Chrome". People who argue that Mozilla was wrong to accept the DRM blob never have a good answer for this and usually then end in "people would have seen that Mozilla is right and boycotted YT" or "who cares if Mozilla has only 1% market share, it's far more important to never make any compromise". It wasn’t just Google: Microsoft and Apple also sold both DRM systems and content, and all three loved the idea of getting rid of Adobe. I never could get anyone to offer a credible theory for how Mozilla could fight those odds.