Firefox 38 released

> That somehow making it more convenient and adding a standards-endorsed API to facilitate its activation will somehow assist in combating it, is a nonsensical proposition.

That is nonsensical but if you were to read my comment, you'll note it's not a proposition I made.

This really isn't hard: 1. Consumers are happily paying for DRMed content 2. The big media companies are not willing to consider releasing content without DRM 3. Nobody likes maintaining plugins or the lower video quality they entail 4. Apple, Google and Microsoft made it clear that they were going to solve #3 by implementing whatever Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc. need to 5. The W3C and Mozilla accepted #4 and used what power they do have to push the process into a public forum. Mozilla has been particularly active to increase user awareness and make it more obvious when your actions are being restricted at a content owner's bequest.

There was no step where someone waves a magic wand and Hollywood stops demanding DRM.

With or without a W3C spec, most desktop users and nearly all mobile users were going to have a browser with DRM playback features. That means there's no step where Mozilla makes EME content harder to use and the reaction is something better than users dropping Firefox for Chrome/IE/Safari.

Again, if you care about this issue the question to focus on is how changing #1. As long as people keep paying for DRMed content, none of the other parties will have the incentive or ability to change.

Thanks for the support. I didn't actually see that post go negative -- it's well into positive territory as I write this -- but it isn't that surprising to me.

There are a lot of people in tech, and particularly in web-related tech, who are very enthusiastic, but whose admirable enthusiasm is not always matched by their realism or level of experience. Any time you challenge an idealised view that something that's being done today is inherently better than something that was done yesterday, you tend to get some resistance. This tends to go double when the reasons for the challenge are based on pragmatic concerns rather than simply trying to use the newest and shiniest tech, as in this case.

There have been many examples over the years: the old CSS-vs-table-layout debate, progressive enhancement/graceful degradation, general hostility towards any sort of plug-ins, general hostility towards DRM schemes (or charging for access to anything, for that matter), "evergreen" browsers vs. IE, A/B testing vs. just about anything else, and recently more variations involving JS or CSS frameworks than I can even count any more. And of course $deity help you if you think flat design is mostly poorly executed rubbish and the worst general trend in design and usability for a generation, because Apple, Microsoft and Google all love it so it must be good! ;-)

So whether or not it attracts some downvotes, I think it's important for someone to challenge new assumptions in these kinds of cases. That's how we figure out what really works, because it stands up to scrutiny. It's also how we shine a light on people who are "moving forward in reverse", however good their intentions or interesting their ideas, and try to steer the industry a tiny bit closer towards something more productive.

Not if the computer is configured to only run signed code, which is an option on Windows.

> Perhaps, but I'm not sure how any of this is different to the various media extension proposals/standards we're starting to see more recently.

Encrypted Media Extensions is an open standard. The small DRM plugins that use it aren't open, but the core standard is. You've moved from a closed, proprietary system for the entire application, to a closed system for just the DRM and nothing else. That's huge progress.

> Please forgive me if I don't take their word for it. The thing is, Flash has run -- and reasonably well -- on numerous other mobile devices, even some from quite a few years ago

No it hasn't. "Flash Lite" worked, but slowly, and it couldn't do anything useful. The killer app for Flash was largely video and games, both of which don't work well in Flash on phones.

> Even if they had been true for early generations of smartphones and tablets, the performance of these types of device was always expected to increase significantly over time, as indeed it has.

By the time Flash could run well on the iPhone, the web had largely gotten rid of Flash and it was fast becoming a legacy technology, so there was no point in supporting it.

> If the performance would still be a problem on today's iOS devices then presumably Apple's users would opt for other implementations instead

The performance is now irrelevant because the web has moved on from Flash.

> browsers are a constant security and stability headache.

Yes, they are! But adding an extra attack surface for those two fronts is never a good idea if you can avoid it.

If you can avoid adding a binary blob to your browser that has frequent security issues, why wouldn't you do so?

> As I said before, there seems little reason to expect better results just because someone shifts things like video rendering and DRM technologies to a slightly different bit of low-level, native, closed source, patent-encumbered, even-the-browser-devs-don't-see-it code written in an error-prone language by the same kinds of development team that wrote the plug-ins.

No video rendering is done by EME, and EME doesn't and probably never will run on the iPhone.

> Is it, really? You're still supporting DRM, because that's the basic requirement here. You're still therefore running unknown, closed source code that is prima facie working against your interests as a user.

On far, far less websites, however. One or two video streaming services have DRM. Banner ads in most pages will not be using EME.

> You still have an extra potential attack vector for malware.

This is true, but one with a smaller surface area. One that might not even be installed, in many cases.

> Flash on phones only really lasted for about two years, and given that the earliest phones somewhere around 2010 were running something like 1GHz low-power processors, it's not entirely surprising that the initial performance wasn't great.

1GHz is slow, now? Wow, Flash must have sucked even more than I thought.

> Various video hosting sites that had been reported to perform badly in earlier criticism were debunked, with evidence that the other junk on the sites was causing more of a problem than the Flash video itself and that similar Flash videos could play just fine on devices of the 2011-2012 era. Likewise claims that Flash seriously reduced battery life didn't stand up to careful scrutiny over several days of investigation in some cases; battery life was generally found to be reduced, by sometimes by no more than a few minutes.

Links? I'd be highly sceptical of this claim: software video decoding is not good for battery life, for example. Of course if it's H.264 I'm sure Flash would use the hardware support, but why would you use Flash in that case?

> When did Flash ever run on the iPhone?

Never, but I mean by the time that the iPhone was powerful enough that getting Flash to run on it might be reasonable.

> Given the number of sites I run into that still don't work properly on an iPad, I have to disagree.

Most of the web has moved on. There are still plenty of sites that don't work with mobile devices and require plugin downloads to be used modern browsers, it's true, but it's a number that is continually decreasing.

> Because I have concerns beyond just security. I don't run a browser so I can be secure. I run a browser so I can browse. When you take security so far that you break the basic functionality of your system, you aren't so much securing it as... breaking the basic functionality of your system.

Flash support isn't "basic functionality". It's a bonus. Mobile devices can't and shouldn't support browsing every website made for a PC in existence, they just need to support most reasonably well, and that they do. After all, PCs still exist.

Mobile devices also don't support simulating right-clicks, Java applets, the Unity web player, ActiveX controls, and so on.

> In any case, with the new model using media extensions, we still will be adding binary blobs to the browser,

Smaller ones with much more limited scope, used in far less places, and which you can blacklist without breaking a lot of websites.