*facepalm*

The open implementations of Flash are a red herring in this case, because they don't support DRM. If you are viewing DRMed content now, you will be using a (the) closed-source Flash player. So the new arrangements are no worse for you.

I see two substantive but fairly subjective questions at the heart of the the difference of opinion here:

What is the level of harm to the web by supporting a sandboxed CDM in Firefox? Those who support this move appear to consider it to be smaller than those who do not, on the basis of the same (bad elements of the) functionality being near ubiquitously supported on firefox installs in the form of flash, and the existence of the same functionality in other major browsers, the user consent to activate, and the sandbox which is expected to protect the users who use the DRM more than they would be if they used flash or a competing browser.

What is the level of long term market share impact in leaving firefox the only major browser unable to view DRM encumbered content? I think few people would consider it a wise strategy to take a position that immediately lost Firefox 95% of its users— nitche hardline forks can be created by everyone, but for firefox's behavior to shape the market at all it must be widely used. I also think that few people would consider the effort or compromise inherent in this DRM stuff to be worth it if its absence only meant losing 1% of the user-base. Personally, I've never used netflix, don't run flash, etc. It's hard for me to imagine it mattering when I extrapolate from my own usage, but at the the same time I know I'm not typical. In the absence of a perfect crystal ball its hard to say what would happen. The normally pretty-principled people who agree with this path have managed to convince themselves that the impact is large. Perhaps limitations in the sustainability of Mozilla's funding create a bias to optimize more for market-share, improving the sustainability isn't easy itself (see how well the advertising tile stuff has gone over) and there are probably worse biases that could exist than wanting to produce things that lots of people want to use.

Does this decision diminish the principled gap between Firefox and other browsers? I think it does, but what of it? Is it now preferable to use browsers that added CDMs in invisible updates and uses them with no notice or consent?

There has to be a more productive way to address disagreements about these tradeoffs (or even outright bad decisions on Mozilla's part) than to just give up like that.

You mean some bits of the web are DRM-free. (If you are asserting the entire web is DRM-free, I think your reality distortion field is too strong for us to continue debating further. You can only do that by defining "web" as excluding all the bits you don't like - "what my net don't catch ain't fish".)

The trouble is, people are interested in the bits of the web that use DRM today (via Flash and Silverlight). Today, Firefox delegates to NPAPI plugins so it can be an all-of-the-web browser. Tomorrow, that solution won't be available. So we have two choices - become a some-of-the-web browser, or find a technical alternative.

And Mozilla (not Firefox!) had ActiveX support at that time, as a module: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm

Indeed, but it seems Mozilla lost confidence in their product and in their abilities to keep above the competition, to make a prodcut that users would want to use for its strengths.

But I think they still have it in them to eventuell start competing again, just like Internet Explorer got turned around.

Not implementing ActiveX was a good decision. It didn't much inhibit our market share (and hence influence in other areas), but it probably did discourage Web devs from deploying ActiveX outside intranets. We're doing similar things today, e.g. by refusing to implement PNaCl/Pepper and other non-standard features.

The situation with DRM is totally different. There aren't simple rules that always work; each situation has to be analyzed on its own.

It is likely that this case is different because there are a lot of wealthy companies that gain a lot through that change and are almost certainly be generous in their rewards.

Adobe, for example, would have no selling point left for their DRM system now that Flash is on the way out. This deal allows them to keep that part of their business alive.

Which will very likely result in a second corporate sponsor for Mozilla (additional to Google), so it is a win-win situation for the two companies.

What you're seeing in that WebRTC bug is someone attempting to rehash an argument they already lost in the rtcweb WG at the IETF (see comments 7 and 9). Our developers were understandably not amused.

This is a classic example of Mozilla pushing for real standards built through an open process instead of "whatever browser X happens to ship". In other words, exactly the kind of good we're able to do because we have market share.

I'm not going to touch the image format debate, because people tend not to respond rationally, but I will say that it is obviously impossible to give everyone what they want all the time. Citing two examples where we have not given someone exactly what they wanted does not imply that there is not some imperative to build a product that people actually want to use in order to have some kind of influence.

I have never known anyone to switch away from firefox because a specific site didnt want to work with it no matter how important the site. I have known dozens to switch after I gave up and quit fixing the cascading UI breakage caused by updating it, however.