Right, the evergreen of explanations by those that betray their principles and users (or, you know, voters).
They exercised a freedom of choice they had, and this is the decision they made. This is what we judge them on. No backsies, no "but I didn't want to", just pure "go fuck yourself Mozilla".
What real alternative did they have? Unlike RMS, Mozilla have always played with a more pragmatic strategy. If you want to win this war, you need to educate users. Being that only a handful of people out there actively care about privacy issues and platform openness, you need to produce a compelling product first and foremost, and then push your agenda on top of that. If Mozilla were to not implement EME, they'd cripple their own capacity to reach those users, and the war would be as good as lost.
A browser 1% of the internet uses is a browser nobody can use. We already have extensive problems with mobile sites being tuned to only work against webkit - or even worse, only work against safari - if Firefox's share drops into the single percentage points because things like Netflix, Farmville and Youtube don't work, due to the exclusion of proprietary web features like plugins and H264, it will become so insigificant that web developers don't even consider it during development.
They haven't just lost this one battle though - they've set themselves up to lose a thousand further battles in the future. This puts Mozilla in a very bad strategic position; once DRM in the form of EME is relied on by a large chunk of the web, they have no way of resisting demands from content providers and their EME module provider to make it more invasive in an attempt to make it more robust. If sites like Youtube start relying on EME, something they will not do without widespread browser support initially, Mozilla will hardly be able to risk losing support for them.
They've taken the proposed 'uncompromised moral stand' before, with H264. And it was an utter failure: Google promised to support them, then quietly stabbed them behind the back and helped advance the cause of proprietary video on the web. Eventually it was impossible to do any good and they had to cave and support H264 - their users would have literally been better off to begin with had they merely implemented H264 in the first place, because some of them would have been able to remain on Firefox instead of having to switch to Chrome to use H264-only websites.
Once Google+Microsoft or Google+Apple or god forbid Google+Microsoft+Apple have decided to do something, there is literally nothing Mozilla can do to stop it. It's too late. If Mozilla manages to slowly build up a larger market share, at that point they may have leverage in those situations. Right now they don't, and pretending to have leverage only further erodes their marketshare.
The war isn't lost because at the end of the day customers and distributors like Apple or Amazon despise it. I just bought this movie and it says my beamer isn't HDCP ready? Nobody wants to deal with that.
Today, we just lost a battle. In it, the Google funded Mozilla mercenaries were slaughtered, their forces diminished. We could award them a medal for their valiant effort, but you know they are dead. The war in the future isn't won or lost on their actions.
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 only if in the toss up between losing Netflix and changing browser, they pick changing browser every single time. Which they won't.
One thing you might not have thought about, is that at the moment, we have Flash, Java, Silverlight, etc which all periodically are found to have mahoosive security flaws - because they can do general purpose things. If Firefox moves to supporting a plugin which is used for exactly the same thing, but that can only do decryption, then suddenly the browser becomes much more secure. If anything, it's an advantage.
What is the proportion of Firefox users using Netflix. Most of Firefox users are in other countries than the US which typically don't have access to Netflix anyways. As soon as DRM becomes accepted by all major browser vendors nothing prevents other site from adopting the same thing which then spreads the usage of DRM. I don't think this is desirable.
For DRM to work it needs to have direct access to the hardware. Otherwise it's too easy to run the plugin in isolation and capture the output. So while the API surface is smaller it's still problematic because DRM bypasses all the sandboxes. Issues like cross-platform support still aren't resolved because DRM providers don't typically provide linux runtimes. I really don't see where this is an advantage versus no DRM.
What's the reason to prefer Mozilla if they're just going to implement all the crap too? Might as well try to figure out the combination of plugins that will make Chrome comfortable. It'll sync with my Android phone easier anyway.
hink the average customer watches Netflix et al through an app on their shitty Samsung smart TV, not through their Firefox browser. So I think this impression that users will suddenly all abandon Firefox is overblown and false.
As I noted above, this decision doesn't make or break DRM. I think we should just take note that Mozilla would betray their principles for some .5% of market share.
They exercised a freedom of choice they had, and this is the decision they made. This is what we judge them on. No backsies, no "but I didn't want to", just pure "go fuck yourself Mozilla".