I assumed what they meant is that the database is publicly available but that browser implementations won't be directly pulling CRLs. Instead the browser provid

I assumed what they meant is that the database is publicly available but that browser implementations won't be directly pulling CRLs. Instead the browser providers pull the CRLs and create a compressed version that their browser users download. In the same way that you can technically query the DNS root servers yourself but you don't tend to do that because your computer will query a more downstream DNS server.