*facepalm*
*facepalm*
Posted May 15, 2014 16:15 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (guest, #27559)In reply to: *facepalm* by gerv
Parent article: Firefox gets closed-source DRM
you cannot be simultaneously fully idealistic and pragmatic
if mozilla wants to prioritize pragmatic goals, it should be honest about its use of lofty rhetoric as a marketing tool
Posted May 15, 2014 18:55 UTC (Thu)
by gmaxwell (guest, #30048)
[Link] (6 responses)
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.
Posted May 16, 2014 11:04 UTC (Fri)
by krake (guest, #55996)
[Link] (2 responses)
The difference of course being that Flash is dying and incurs cost and overhead for the publisher (the publishers have made it quite clear that their main interest in EME is to cut the cost of custom solutions).
> I think few people would consider it a wise strategy to take a position that immediately lost Firefox 95% of its users
I think most people were just not aware that 95% of Firefox's users are North American Windows users with a Netflix or Hulu account.
That of course makes the decision a no-brainer
Posted May 16, 2014 20:17 UTC (Fri)
by gmaxwell (guest, #30048)
[Link]
Was I really that unclear or??
I wasn't arguing that there is any particular level of impact, but attempting to point out that for some level of impact on each side (e.g. 1% or 95%) where there would be a lot more agreement on coarse of action. The actual level of impact is especially hard to estimate because right now the people who are using firefox who would switch to chrome if this stuff stopped working are being accommodated by Flash which, as you note, is dying— so there is a reasonable argument that even if there is no impact today it will likely increase.
Posted May 20, 2014 15:25 UTC (Tue)
by ceplm (subscriber, #41334)
[Link]
* http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/
Posted May 19, 2014 6:26 UTC (Mon)
by Arker (guest, #14205)
[Link] (2 responses)
It's a different thing, it's outside the free and open web but still accessible through it, if you install the necessary compromise on your machine. All clear enough that non-technical users can, with a little effort, get a roughly accurate understanding of the situation and make their own choices accordingly.
With EME you have just blurred this to the point none of that will be true anymore. You're officially blessing this thing, in the minds of any innocent non-technical users who trust you, as part of the free and open web.
Mozilla was afraid of losing marketshare, fine. Mozilla needed to ask itself instead why it had marketshare to begin with. It was not because Firefox had the best support for Netflix!
Posted May 19, 2014 6:38 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Posted May 19, 2014 7:48 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
With EME they will still have to get an external plugin from another source. Just the same way they get flash today.
The difference is that the EME plugin will be able to do a lot less than the flash plugin can do.
*facepalm*
*facepalm*
*facepalm*
*facepalm*
* http://www.bbc.com/news/video_and_audio/
* http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ct24/zive-vysilani/ (that's Czech TV)
* http://rt.com/on-air/ ... actually, no, I don't want to see that, and who wants to see it needs CENSORED
* etc.
*facepalm*
*facepalm*
Yes, it was because Firefox had a superior experience compared to IE6 and it was free (unlike Opera).
*facepalm*