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Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

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Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, again, I tend to be charitable towards others. There are several other explanations for the donation: maybe he was drunk and did it on a dare, maybe he was bored, maybe he needed to spend the money to piss somebody off, maybe he actually does respect LGBT folks but believes that marriage should be clearly defined, maybe he wanted to force the issue because he found it so odious he wanted to see it properly overtu…

Any one of those explanations could have been offered when he was asked about the matter and it would have almost completely defused it. That's what I'm trying to get through to you. It's not just the donation. It's not just the fact that he'd rather quit a CEO position rather than answer a direct question about it. (Which is pretty damning all by itself - but.) It's not just the fact that he still hasn't addressed i…

Why should he apologize for beliefs he had and still has?

Why should he be expected to justify his political and/or religious beliefs to anyone?

Why should he be expected to do that AFTER he resigned?

Ridiculous.

Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#192
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla's entire mission statement is contrary to Eich's stated beliefs https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ Their mission statement is to create an open internet. To suggest that the people that made him leave cared about a culture fit at a company the didn't work at is ludicrous.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/part... "Mozilla-based activities should be inclusive and should support such diversity." Okay. If Eich was still there, this must logically be followed with: "..Nevermind that one C-level guy over there who took positive action to deny some of you rights, this absolutely will not impact anything in any way and we as a company still hold these views of diversity…

By your own comments he wouldn't answer questions on the subject. Do you even really know what his beliefs are?

Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#193
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody can silo their beliefs So we need to stop discrimination before it happens? How do you feel about implementing some pre-crime measures nation-wide? As soon as he started advocating some anti-gay hiring policies, or rejecting pull requests from transvestites, then the consequences would've made sense to me. Though that's an idealist view, in reality letting him stay would've been interpreted as an endorsment…

I'm having a really hard time writing this without snark, so forgive me if any of it comes through: In reality letting him stay would've been interpreted as an endorsement by all the people making a huge fuss about it Those people "making a huge fuss about it" were denied equal rights for an additional six years thanks, in part, to Eich. Are you suggesting they should have just shut up? Where do you draw the line? Di…

Eich and most of the voters in California.

Can you please point out where he said gays are inferior?

Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#194
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might worry that you wouldn't notice which sites are using it. Or you might want to send a message to sites, or to Mozilla, that you think DRM is bad and that you don't want to have DRM implementations installed. One of the worst things about each browser vendor's decision to support DRM is that it makes the choice to require DRM less costly for new web sites that are considering it. So even if you think Netflix…

Also, if you do visit a site that uses DRM and your browser doesn't support it, it will show up in the server logs, so just using it is sending a message.

Sadly, it doesn't. I was hoping for this as well, so I tested it, and it turns out that the user agent of the two browsers are identical.

  EME:      Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0  
  EME-free: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0

Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#195
post #143

Actually, the best way to fight this would be to fund people to break the DRM blob. What better way to drive home the uselessness of DRM than to have zillions of people having an automatic plugin that bypasses DRM everywhere it runs?

The best way to fight this would be to stop buying content from companies that use DRM.

God damn, get some self control people.

Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any plans to build a completely new browser from Servo? Is there even any worth in that? (A firefox-esque "normal" one, not like that experimental html browser thing.)

(Servo contributor here) No concrete plans. We hope to get a new mobile browser out. For Desktop we're hopeful about browser.html. As a research project we aren't really worrying about any of this yet. browser.html is intended to be a "normal" browser, though in it's current state it isn't quite there yet :P (It's not pure web HTML, there is a small set of "mozbrowser" APIs which it uses to get sandboxing and the oth…

Thanks for the response. With browser.html, I think I meant functionally, like isn't it supposed to be marketed as a simple, out-of-box, no configuration browser for those who just want no hassle simple web browsing? (Because otherwise I might be confusing it with something else, although I was sure I saw that Mozilla research was doing something like this.)

Because if it is, I obviously don't want that... I "just" want a free software html/css/js spec compliant browser (obviously without the drm, or an option without that part, because that's not free software), but the catch is that I sort of need it to be quite customisable...

By which I mean something akin to the current firefox, which allows addons, a great powerful addon api, unlike chrome, allows modifying the ui (via userChrome.css), modifying display of web pages themselves (via userContent.css), developer console, setting configuration options via a config file, view page source etc.

This seems off-topic and almost like a personal feature request for Servo or whatever, but my point is that I know my "setup" isn't exactly 'mainstream', hence why I basically require powerful customisation options. For example, I'm on firefox (37), but it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/L9P8XhC.png. And it's not exactly a whole heap of fragile customisations which are destined to break, it's "just" one userchrome file and one addon, so it's actually fairly reliable too.

I care about the ui in that I want the power to change it to what I like. If I can do that, I don't care what the default ui is. But I don't think browser.html's purpose is to be powerful like current firefox is it?

I guess normal isn't the right word. If anything, you're right, browser.html is normal, but not in the way I've grown accustomed to with the feature-filled firefox. If you're familiar with zsh and the fish shell, I mentally labelled browser.html as the special "fish shell" of browsers the first time I saw it, hence why I was quick to dismiss it as a future option. I should probably go and embed servo in emacs or something.. :)

Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#197
post #143

Actually, the best way to fight this would be to fund people to break the DRM blob. What better way to drive home the uselessness of DRM than to have zillions of people having an automatic plugin that bypasses DRM everywhere it runs?

Wouldn't this violate the dmca? If it's not something people can get with minimal effort, then millions of people are not going to use it. The ad-blocking plugins are so successful because their so easy to get. If something's illegal to distribute, then it's sufficiently inconvenient to obtain (tormenting, etc.) that most people won't bother. http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/

Just develop & distribute it from outside the US.

Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Servo contributor here) No concrete plans. We hope to get a new mobile browser out. For Desktop we're hopeful about browser.html. As a research project we aren't really worrying about any of this yet. browser.html is intended to be a "normal" browser, though in it's current state it isn't quite there yet :P (It's not pure web HTML, there is a small set of "mozbrowser" APIs which it uses to get sandboxing and the oth…

Thanks for the response. With browser.html, I think I meant functionally , like isn't it supposed to be marketed as a simple, out-of-box, no configuration browser for those who just want no hassle simple web browsing? (Because otherwise I might be confusing it with something else, although I was sure I saw that Mozilla research was doing something like this.) Because if it is, I obviously don't want that... I "just"…

I don't think there's a fixed end goal for browser.html; it's also a research project.

Spec compliance is Servo's problem. Customizability -- well, browser.html should be just as customizable as Firefox once it gets polished. Like I said, browser.html uses HTML, and Firefox uses XUL, both in mostly the same way. Firefox largely uses XUL because HTML wasn't so powerful in the past, but now it is, and technically we could replace a lot of the XUL with HTML5. Which is sort of what browser.html does. Many firefox UI components are slowly being replaced by html variants these days too.

Now with Firefox's addon API, you write addons using XUL/XPCOM. With browser.html it would be HTML/JS, and you'd be able to hook into any part of the chrome[1] you want. Addons would basically be like userscripts, except they would be for the whole browser chrome. So for example you could write a simple CSS addon that colors the location bar yellow, or write a more complex one that moves the tab strip to the side, or whatever.

Of course, since browser.html is still researchy, I don't think there are plans for an addon api yet. I'm just saying that an addon api for browser.html sounds like something that could be done. I haven't worked with browser.html, so I could be very wrong here.

Actually, fwiw you probably can write your own browser UI (right now!) from scratch using the same APIs that browser.html uses. Instead of fixing an existing UI by totally rearranging everything, write your own! Check out https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell to see what APIs work in Servo and how to use them.

Servo has a usable-ish embedding API, you might actually be able to do the emacs thing (it might help if you chat with zmike in the #servo Mozilla IRC room)

[1]: browser chrome = the stuff outside the layout engine; the UI (location bar, bookmarks, history, devtools, etc)

Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or does it truly rely on blackbox obfuscation? The client ultimately has to decrypt the data somehow. So the key is there on the client. I take it obfuscation is the only thing standing between the user and that key. Am I correct about that? Which makes me wonder: How much security does HTML5 DRM really provide? Security through obscurity is a very weak defense, and one that is almost invariable defeated sooner or…

This isn't security through obscurity, unless the DRM implementation being a secret actually does provide security. I doubt it does, beyond the fact that an audit of the source could probably find a load of security issues. Of course an audit of OpenSSL would do the same.

* unless the DRM implementation being a secret actually does provide security.*

It Does, because it is illegal(at least in the US) to reverse engineer it.

Re: Mozilla Launches a New Firefox Version Without DRM Support

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the response. With browser.html, I think I meant functionally , like isn't it supposed to be marketed as a simple, out-of-box, no configuration browser for those who just want no hassle simple web browsing? (Because otherwise I might be confusing it with something else, although I was sure I saw that Mozilla research was doing something like this.) Because if it is, I obviously don't want that... I "just"…

I don't think there's a fixed end goal for browser.html; it's also a research project. Spec compliance is Servo's problem. Customizability -- well, browser.html should be just as customizable as Firefox once it gets polished. Like I said, browser.html uses HTML, and Firefox uses XUL, both in mostly the same way. Firefox largely uses XUL because HTML wasn't so powerful in the past, but now it is, and technically we co…

Wow thanks for the taking the time for the comprehensive reply! :) Really, my comment turned into a half-rant, and I wasn't expecting such a response!

Well honestly, if it does become "hackable" (i.e. ui, addons), then that invalidates all of what I said. But yes it is still experimental as you say of course, so I understand.

This is a bit off topic, but one thing that's really deterring me from firefox lately is the signed extensions thing. [1] To cut to the point, I'm not sure how credible random tweets are, but just as a light example, I got someone (from mozilla security) to admit it's a mistake [2]. (Sort of, I'm twisting the words I think, english actually not my native language, so I still have trouble expressing myself sometimes.)

My comment is just that I hope that servo/browser.html doesn't make the same "mistake". I.e. implement proper addon security, sandboxing etc. Because, if you guys do plan for an addons api, and if you give it the power ("except they would be for the whole browser chrome"), then you should also plan ahead on the security implications of that too, if any. I guess I should watch the servo project for any addon plans and bring it up there! But other than that, I'm not a security guy, so I cannot say what exactly to do.

If you're wondering why... yes extension signing is great of course, just not when only Mozilla has the power to do so imo: [3] (Not my blog, but iirc I think I agree with most of the post.)

And funny that you mentioned servo-shell by glennw, I actually remembered that when writing my previous comment and had a tab open on it! See my screenshot, top left! :p

Also, thanks for the irc hint!

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing...

[2]: https://twitter.com/dveditz/status/591996675100545024

[3]: http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/110743007958/mozillas-...

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