Firefox’s adoption of closed-source DRM breaks my heart (2014)

Post by walterbell » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 2:15 AM UTC

greggman wrote: post #68

bigbugbag wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Chrome is a google product. I'm not using chrome ever, why would I voluntarily install spyware ? One that bundles itself with many freeware. Firefox sucks a lot (no usable UI integration, missing many basic modern features, changes stripping user of choice, and more) but chrome sucks to infinity and is automatically disqualified, I would consider Iron but not chrome. Now my hopes are for vivaldi, I'm wa…

You can use Chromium and have all the supposed "Spyware" removed. Although there is no spyware in Chrome. Also Chrome doesn't bundle itself with anything other than a special more secure version of flash which you can turn off. If you got a version bundled with something else that was a fake install by a 3rd party. The same thing happens to firefox Here's a search for chrome. First 3 links are fake installers made by…

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 6:41 AM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #72

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash and Silverlight were both dying before EME existed. Basically all it took was for Apple to say "no Flash" and Flash was as good as dead. I don't understand why you think that a free software infrastructure with a strong market position would be incapable of doing the same thing.

But what happened to netflix when apple said no plugins? They made it an app. The whole idea behind the no flash movement was to move services that relied on a plugin, away from the web and onto the app store. Apple wasn't fighting for free technology, they were pushing users onto Apple's own version of EME. Let's imagine all web browsers drop flash, silverlight, EME and all the other common technologies used for DRM…

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:54 AM UTC

jegoodwin3 wrote: post #41

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash and Silverlight were both dying before EME existed. Basically all it took was for Apple to say "no Flash" and Flash was as good as dead. I don't understand why you think that a free software infrastructure with a strong market position would be incapable of doing the same thing.

'market position' is a red herring -- it's a proxy for Developer Will. Developers care about the market share of what platform they write for, and they care about it more than principle. You might as well say, if the developer community got its act together and stood on principle, no company could caputure 'market share' without their consent. The problem is not the Mozilla non-profit knuckling under -- it is develop…

Post by mikeratcliffe » Tue, Feb 10, 2015, 11:13 AM UTC

greggman wrote: post #46

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #9

There is an unintuitive takeaway from this. The reason Firefox is allowing this is that browsers and operating systems produced by nonprofits acting in the public interest don't have enough market share to resist being dictated to by for-profit corporations. Imagine FirefoxOS had the market share of Android and Debian had the market share of Windows. Would we still be having this conversation? The free software peopl…

Unfortunately Firefox has 5x the code exploit bugs vs Chrome. If we just take 2014 Firefox had 13x code exploits over Chrome. http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v... http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?... Until that number changes I'm not switching to back to Firefox.