 Mozilla's Original Sin. Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a *company shipping products*, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web. Those are different things and are very much in conflict. [...] 33 comments
@jwz disagree. I know many ppl that would or could not use Firefox if they hadn’t and like this it’s a viable alternative. What do the gazilion Mozilla/netscape/firefox or chromium forks/alternatives do for the open web because they disable drm or replaced / removed other functionality? Not much. @jwz I’m sure ffx ppl could do more and it can lead to bad things, but many other roads just lead to irrelevance. In that sense, shipping things is importantly, because of you f e have the most morally correct product, but many cannot use it or it cannot do what they need, what impact do you really have? @jwz not ‘some people’ but basically no one would have used it. I don’t disagree that it (engaging with market realities) is also a problem, but that does not mean that the opposite would have been better @fl0_id @jwz there were and are a multiple people that would have used Firefox if they took a stance against DRM. Those that care about the open web. You know their _mission_. If you can't see how supporting drm means abandonding their mission then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. This isnt even a one step back two forward strategy. Its not like they implemented DRM as part of a larger plan to provide a non DRMed alternative @PuercoPop @jwz I'm not saying there weren't, just overall not many. I don't like drm either, I just think that often you have to balance principles against usability, market forces and all kinds of other things. open web proponents and similar are very bad at this, and always think their priorities are most important.       @jwz Respectful dissent, sir. Mozilla's *worst* decision was inflicting JavaScript upon the world, for the lamest reasons possible. All anyone had to do was talk to victims of MS Word macro viruses to realize putting a scripting language into what is putatively a document, and then *running them by default*, was a monstrously dumb idea. "But Micros~1 would have..." Yeah. And then Mozilla could point and say, "Word macro viruses at *Web scale?* Are they completely deranged?" @jwz Well, now that you've brought up BLINK... When I first saw that tag in the HTML spec, I was convinced it was put in as a sop to convince advertisers that they could migrate over from NAPLPS (used by the Prodigy online service), which defined a blink attribute, and which also got overused. Also: The browser that shipped with BeOS -- NetPositive -- had an easter egg in it where, every 100th blink, the blinking text would be replaced with "Buy Now."  How else could the people we now call techbros have a Neuromancer future where the cyberspace can eat your brain? We're living in a bad movie adapted from the Sprawl trilogy. You can't have the Turing Police without Turing completeness in the first place. This kind of reminds me when Netscape was enshitified and Mozilla was sort spun off as an answer to Netscape, when Internet Explorer first stepped on to the scene and people wore onions around their belt - which was the style at the time. Anyho, some people are actively trying to implement Proton, or "Servo" as it's called, outside of Mozilla, and look who is funding it. Get this sucker on to npm and we might get a competitor to Electron AND Firefox. @jwz I'm not convinced that needing a proprietary multipurpose plugin (Flash/Silverlight) is better than EME where the proprietary DRM stuff is contained to only do DRM in its tight sandbox. Though it's an interesting point that someone else would have patched in EME into a fork if Firefox had refused to...  @jwz My impression of current state of DRM in the browser forks is they got it working, but it frequently breaks. @jwz now I'm wondering how much of that marketshare stuff is potentially inflated by  @jwz people want the tools they use to be useful. a browser that can play Netflix is objectively more useful than a browser that cannot  Spot on! @jwz I was the lone sole that told Mitchell, and the exec team at a weekly all hands meeting that this was a bad idea and very much against Mozilla 's ethos. Before I did, at the mic, I led with "I'm sorry to those remote; what I'm about to say isn't available in your region" then turned the mic. It was in vain, I suspect they were desperate that if they didn't capitulate, they'd lose Netflix and thus more users. Few people emailed me after to thank me for standing up for what was right. @jwz I was very very idealistic then. Many people advised me to be more pragmatic. One of the execs (now at apple) asked me to implement a DRM system if I thought I could do better than EME. Twisted thing to ask IMO. In the end, I went to go work for Google. |
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obvious CC: @endDRM ;)