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> In mid-2024, he pointed out its "Original Sin" of adopting digital rights management. I disagree on that one. Maybe it could have been an option 15-20 years
by GuB-42 1y ago
> In mid-2024, he pointed out its "Original Sin" of adopting digital rights management.
I disagree on that one. Maybe it could have been an option 15-20 years ago, when Firefox was a significant force. But now, if it didn't have DRM, platforms that use DRM would just tell people to use another browser, or a specialized app. And people who are not activists would just switch to "the browser that runs $service", and then you give free reign to whoever controls these browsers, including making the DRM more restrictive and more invading.
DRM is an addon, it lets you do thing that you can't do without (i.e. watching protected content), but it won't affect non-DRM content. You can turn it off if you want, you just won't be able to watch Netflix (or whatever), making it a worse user experience.
If you refuse to support DRM (and therefore denying your users of some content), hoping that it will discourage adoption of DRM by platforms, you have to keep your users captive so that they won't just switch. And considering that Firefox doesn't rely on lock-in: they don't have the means to do so, and it is against the spirit in the first place, they have to offset that by offering something else. And unfortunately, they don't have much to offer besides ideology.
The original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure,... Having to accept DRM, as well as anything Google decided was standard is a consequence of that.
That's why I had high hopes with Servo. It had the potential to make Firefox a "better browser", giving them some weight when deciding not to support some anti-feature, but they lost it.
They also lost an opportunity on mobile by not supporting extensions for too long, and generally, for not being taken seriously. Why did it take them so long to support DNS-over-HTTPS for instance?
Now, they have an opportunity regarding ad-blocking, I don't know how they are going to waste that one, but knowing them, they are probably going to manage it.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoThe original sin, if we can call it that, is that Firefox technically lagged behind Chrome: slower, more bugs, less secure I only want to comment on the more bugs component because for a time it seemed like all of the sites least likely to work in Firefox were Google run. Google was choosing to exclusively code to Chrome’s latest standard. When people cannot run YouTube, Gmail, whatever, but Chrome can, not surprising when users flee.
- GuB-42 1y agoI am not talking about website compatibility, in fact, for as far as I can tell, I had no problem with Google services using Firefox. Some degradation maybe, but not enough for me to notice. To give your an example, here is the bug that made me switch to Chrome: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 May seem trivial, but that's with bugs like these that you lose users. I wanted my mouse to zoom, my mouse didn't zoom on Firefox (and only on Firefox), I tried Chrome, it worked, found no (technical) downside, it was faster, so I stayed with Chrome. I continued using Firefox on another PC, and I saw a lot more crashes, slowdowns, etc... on Firefox, also, a single tab could crash the entire browser (it was before Electrolysis and Quantum). Website incompatibility wasn't actually that much of a problem, it mostly affected corporate intranets, which were equal part Chrome-only and IE-only during that time. Things have improved on the Firefox side (Quantum!), and I don't use that mouse anymore, so I am back on Firefox for most part, the ad-blocking thing pushed me back, hoping that they don't to anything crazy to push me away like they did before.
- em-bee 1y agoi have yet to find a site where i needed to activate DRM. even on sites where firefox did tell me to activate DRM, i just ignored it and the site worked fine. that said, having the feature built in doesn't bother me as long as i have the option to ignore it or keep it turned off
- ygjb 1y agoMany streaming services will offer lower fidelity options if DRM is not enabled due to licensing agreements with third party content owners.
- kasabali 1y agoThose sites offer lower fidelity resolutions either way, DRM plugin is worthless. Heck, Netflix doesn't offer 4K streams even on a fully locked devices with L1 certificate, they have a separate licensing program that device vendors must participate in to get their products to be able to run Netflix.
- kevinherron 1y agoTry Spotify’s web player.
- LtWorf 1y agoThe crappy compliance videos at my job have DRM :D As if anyone would like to watch them when not forced to.
- GuB-42 1y agoHey, I am sure people are payed very good money for these! I wonder what the people making these videos are thinking. They know what people think of them, if they actually watch them before taking the usually obvious questionnaire that follows (hint: the answer is always "talk to your manager"). It reminds me of the time we took an electrical certification that we honestly didn't need but legally, we had to. It was in person, and the guy was actually great, and I think it is in a good part because he knew his place. He quickly got passed the regulatory aspects, then spent the rest of the time explaining stuff about house wiring, how breakers work, told us some entertaining (if sometimes a little morbid) stories and shown videos about electrical accidents. So it was maybe 10% what we were supposed to be for and 90% general information we could make use of in our daily life, all while keeping things entertaining.