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Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

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Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#241

Post by dblohm7 »

zimbatm wrote: post #208
verbin217 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. Sometimes you're forced to either do something shitty or be competitively displaced by actors that will do it anyway. Do you really want Mozilla to fall on their sword and leave us with worse alternatives? I don't understand how you could be upset with Mozilla about this. The decision is basically being made for them.

Give me one site whose videos you can't watch on Firefox for Windows or Mac currently. The only real contender is Netflix but only once the Silverlight plugins reaches EOL. At that point Netflix will have to choose if they want to risk loosing 16% (est.) of their Firefox customers. Of course if Mozilla decides to implement DRM right now it won't be an issue for them.

That's not a very high risk. It's trivial for users to switch to another browser that does work with Netflix.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#242

Post by takluyver »

toyg wrote: post #57
GuiA wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding ding ding! You've hit the nail on the head. Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise). Mozilla has an illusion of power, which is tolerated by the other actors because it makes everyone happy. But no one should mistake it for real leverage.

Mozilla has had real power for a brief period, when both MS and Google had their eyes off the ball. Once Chrome matured, the game was up. It didn't help that it took them ages to fix widespread performance problems in FF... This said, if they go back to their roots as "ayatollah of open web and open source", I might consider them again; but until they're just another ad-backed bureaucracy, I might as well stick to a…

Mozilla still has some power, but they don't think they have enough to mount a lone assault on video DRM. I'm inclined to agree with them.

But I'd rather they saved that power for the next fight rather than going kamikaze on this. I'm sure there will be a next fight, and there's a good chance that it will be something smaller, or they'll have another major browser on their side.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#243

Post by CHY872 »

simon_vetter wrote: post #62
themoonbus wrote: post #3

Can some one explain to me why having, say, an HTML 5 based video player with DRM would be worse than one implemented in a closed platform like Silverlight or Flash? I'm genuinely curious, and not trying to make an argument here.

Because Adobe will be writing a closed-source module distributed in a binary form, you'll end up with the exact same situation as with plugins IMHO. Only a subset of the available OS and processor architectures will be supported. Flash was designed years ago and even though everyone wants it to die, we're still feeling its pain. Designing a similar solution in 2014 is just asking for trouble for the next 10-20 years…

Flash attempted to do everything - what we're seeing from it now is just the last few use cases for which it has not been replaced with HTML5 - and the solution is for the single use case for which HTML5 is a bad fit - reducing the bloat, enabling performance improvements and massively reducing the size of the TCB. Ultimately it's about as good as can be got out of html5 video.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#244

Post by couchand »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #231
rbanffy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the wrong choice. WHat would the web gain if Mozilla lost most of its user base? Could we trust Apple, Microsoft and Google to have a moral backbone?

Mozilla was compromised the day they started taking money from Google.

While I appreciate the sentiment, I have to disagree. Mozilla has real power because they have a real revenue stream, which is (unfortunately, but realistically) almost entirely from Google.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#245

Post by joaren »

jgon wrote: post #161
ep103 wrote: post #138

There are so many people here claiming this is the wrong choice, and yet I wonder what percentage of the commenters here are using chrome? By most sources I've seen, Chrome has 2x the marketshare, and actively pushed FOR EME. Perhaps if FF had Chrome's current marketshare, they would have been in a position to say no, but its the users who made that impossible. Mozilla should be commended for fighting as far as they…

Thank you. Watching people on this site verbally fellate Chrome and Safari on the basis of incredibly trivial things like look and feel and "minimal UI", while ignoring the incredibly important things like the company building the products and it's positions is frustrating, even more so now that they are all crawling out of the woodwork crying alligator tears. The tech community brought this upon itself when it switc…

Oh really?

Mozilla brought this on itself when they took the epic lead they had with Firebug and utterly squandered it by thinking real dev tools were not something a browser should include out of the box, in favour of an utterly useless "3D" DOM view that is a made up diagram conveying no useful information about compositing or layering.

Mozilla brought this on itself when they treated memory leaks and extension crashes as performance issues to be papered over rather than fundamental flaws in an architecture unprepared for how people wanted to use it.

Mozilla brought this on itself when they treated OS X like the idiot stepchild instead of delivering the native experience users clearly loved in Chrome and Safari, thus alienating the Mac-dominated cutting edge of web tech.

Mozilla brought this on itself when they provided incomplete implementations of CSS transforms, Web Audio and WebGL (an idea they originated!), and a bunch of other specs people actually wanted. Parts of WebGL are broken in the current stable release of Firefox, and yet Mozilla wants to go around claiming the high ground with Unreal and asm.js?

If they'd spend less money on having their 'evangelists' show off trivial toys around the world, and more on actually solving real daily problems (like the Chrome developer tools team did), we wouldn't be in this mess, and they wouldn't think moves of desperation like asm.js are a good idea.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#246

Post by BigChiefSmokem »

User9821 wrote: post #197
13throwaway wrote: post #46

If all major browsers support eme, every website will use it. Say goodbye to youtube-dl. Maybe next year eme will be updated to "protect" html. Soon the entire web may be a closed system. It doesn't matter what the FCC decides on Friday, today is the day the web dies, at mozilla's hands. There is always a choice mozilla, please make the right one.

Mozilla doesn't have a choice. Let's say Firefox has 30% of users. The argument is that sites will not use DRM, because they'll be losing revenue from 30% of their users, and therefore Mozilla saves the day. But, what happens if Google says they'll accept that challenge, and they're willing to lose 30% of revenue from something like YouTube in the short term. They implement DRM on YouTube, and Firefox users can no lo…

I like what you are saying and I too think this way.

My solution has always been that we need to teach people and make it easy for them to hop onto the darknets and any decentralized networks while also helping smaller companies and indie devs establish their business outside the boundaries of the commercial internet and onto the Deep Web.

This will allow us to reboot back to the early 90s and rip power away from all these present-day corporations who've turned the commercial internet into a money-grubbing mess.

Data exchange should know no boundaries.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#247

Post by Dylan16807 »

res0nat0r wrote: post #234
Dylan16807 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright is a government-created monopoly.

Is there something inherently wrong with content creators controlling how their content is consumed?

It's not inherently wrong but it's inherently not a completely free market.

Almost all markets have elements of regulation, and these must be kept in mind when discussing solutions.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#248

Post by mehwoot »

nullc wrote: post #167
kevingadd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. It's open source. You're being paranoid. You can recompile it with CDMs turned off entirely or download a fork that does it.

> It's open source [...] You can recompile it Careful. Thats a somewhat empty response. It's technically true, but its an enormous barrier— even if someone else compiles it for you, how do you know their binary is trustworthy? It's like saying that humans don't need oxygen to survive, because you can extract oxygen from the electrolysis of water. :) You have to consider the tradeoffs users are presented with, and the…

Careful. Thats a somewhat empty response. It's technically true, but its an enormous barrier— even if someone else compiles it for you, how do you know their binary is trustworthy?

Your claim is incoherent... if you don't currently compile firefox yourself, then you're in exactly the same situation, how do you know the binary is trustworthy?

If you do currently compile it yourself, what's the big deal?

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#249

Post by CHY872 »

mkhalil wrote: post #183

They should keep their browser open. Most people that use Mozilla know why they're using it. They would also understand how to install an official Firefox plugin to get crappy EME websites to work.

I think you're overestimating 'Most' people. If Firefox has a ~20% market share, that's saying that there are hundreds of millions of Firefox users who use it for the freedom (as opposed to the competitive performance and the fact that it's not IE) - and that simply cannot be correct.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#250

Post by dragonwriter »

IgorPartola wrote: post #115
Silhouette wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bend here and the web itself is under threat. Don't bend here and Mozilla itself could be under threat. DRM exists, many major content providers have shown little interest in releasing their material without a mechanism for preventing casual copying (and you can hardly blame them), and accessing multimedia downloads is an increasingly important function of the Web. Denying that reality isn't going to achieve anything…

What's more important Mozilla or the web? This is a case where Mozilla thinks that by sticking around they can do more good than by killing this particular attack on the free web. Can we justify this completely? IMHO, no. Perhaps the whole existence of Mozilla was leading up to this point where it could commit ritualistic suicide and take this DRM proposal with it. Of course nobody at Mozilla will see it that way. Or…

> Perhaps the whole existence of Mozilla was leading up to this point where it could commit ritualistic suicide and take this DRM proposal with it.

The only reason Mozilla taking a "we will not do it" approach to EME would be suicide (ritual or otherwise) would be if doing so would fail to derail the adoption of EME. If users would abandon Mozilla over not supporting EME (well, not supporting the sites that require it), then, sure, it would be suicide -- but it would be suicide because the sites demanding EME would be important enough to users that they would abandon Mozilla and Mozilla's usage-dependent revenue stream would dry up.

If Mozilla could derail EME by refusing to implement, that would also mean it wouldn't be suicide.

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