I wish more were done to push back against this consolidation of power by these platforms.
We're like frogs that have been stoking the fuel of our own pot.
It used to be that DRM was considered to be in conflict with the browser, because it was not acting on behalf of the user. If you must have DRM, then it is on the platform to shoehorn it in through an external plugin, like Silverlight.
When Firefox adopted EME extensions, I knew it was the beginning of the end; they were rolling out the red carpet for DRM. If we make DRM a switch that can simply be thrown, then it will become the norm, not the exception. And there have been proposals for years to DRM fonts and other absurdities. If a company insists on using DRM, then they should have to shoulder the burden of doing something that a browser was never support to support.
The nightmare that we're racing toward is you will only be permitted to cache a trickle of video at a time and your TPM attestation hardware must include a token in every HTTP request. Your browser will just be a software cablebox.
They aren't happy about URLs either and would love to require that if you want to share a reference to something, you have to do it on their terms, like generating a url in their app with a hash that expires and limited in how many times it can be viewed. I'm sure influencers will still have the privilege of unlimited sharing.
They've been slowly rolling this infrastructure out for the last decade. These are not isolated inconveniences, these are coffin nails.
> The alternative is that people complain "netflix doesn't work on firefox", switch to chrome instead, which is even worse.
So what if users complain? How is it better for Firefox to do something bad just because Google is doing something bad?
Firefox is supposed to provide an alternative to what's out there. Firefox also didn't support some popular proprietary Internet Explorer features, and they never attempted to. For a time, much of MySpace didn't work as well in Firefox. But I'm glad that Firefox didn't cave, even if some users complained that they couldn't make the scrollbars neon green or make music autoplay.
Not letting Microsoft or Google dictate how they implement a web browser worked out really well for them.
Chasing proprietary platforms has ruined them.
At the time EME was adopted Firefox was much more popular, I think 20% back in 2012. Video platforms were using Silverlight for DRM. There's a good chance that EME would not have gotten off the ground if Mozilla didn't embrace it, or at least not as quickly.
Mozilla should have taken a stand and refused to support EME when they had the chance. They would be better off than they are now. And there's a good chance Netflix would not have thrown away a double digit percentage of subscribers.
Instead they embraced DRM and now they have nothing.
That's almost certainly their rationale, bit I'm not convinced it's sound. Firefox's market share is pretty dire anyway, and many people watch Netflix through phones and tv apps now, rather than their actual browser, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't an issue at all.
We're like frogs that have been stoking the fuel of our own pot.
It used to be that DRM was considered to be in conflict with the browser, because it was not acting on behalf of the user. If you must have DRM, then it is on the platform to shoehorn it in through an external plugin, like Silverlight.
When Firefox adopted EME extensions, I knew it was the beginning of the end; they were rolling out the red carpet for DRM. If we make DRM a switch that can simply be thrown, then it will become the norm, not the exception. And there have been proposals for years to DRM fonts and other absurdities. If a company insists on using DRM, then they should have to shoulder the burden of doing something that a browser was never support to support.
The nightmare that we're racing toward is you will only be permitted to cache a trickle of video at a time and your TPM attestation hardware must include a token in every HTTP request. Your browser will just be a software cablebox.
They aren't happy about URLs either and would love to require that if you want to share a reference to something, you have to do it on their terms, like generating a url in their app with a hash that expires and limited in how many times it can be viewed. I'm sure influencers will still have the privilege of unlimited sharing.
They've been slowly rolling this infrastructure out for the last decade. These are not isolated inconveniences, these are coffin nails.