Comment by gruez
6 hours ago
>I think this is because simply chasing Chrome didn't have the desired effect anyway. By doing so, Mozilla hurt Firefox by gradually reducing what differentiated it from Chrome in the first place, relegating it to be kind of just a worse Chrome that looks even weirder.
That logic might work for firefox's product direction as a whole, but narrowly looking at the EME issue, what should have they done? If they didn't implement EME, then people will have to install chrome to watch netfilx. The users who are there as a matter of principle (eg. HN readers) might still use firefox as their daily driver, but they'd almost certainly lose some normies who were using firefox on inertia. Meanwhile because they refused to negotiate, they won't be able to influence the direction of the standard, which means no sandboxing of DRM modules and other privacy features. Both firefox and their users lose out in this scenario.
Simple: allow those users to be lost to preserve the product. The entire Internet is not Netflix. Most Netflix users today don't even use their laptops or desktops for Netflix: they use it on their TVs, phones, video game consoles.
Firefox is a bad way to use Netflix anyways. It doesn't support high resolutions because it has limited Widevine support anyways. It doesn't support Widevine l1 and never has. So... It is a worse way to watch Netflix.
I'm sorry but this "we can't possibly take a risk like this" mentality is cancerous. It is comfortable to "play it safe" and all, but nobody takes any risks for anything anymore. It's not calculated when the calculation is "avoid risk at all costs".
> Simple: allow those users to be lost to preserve the product.
Lose the users lose the funding. Firefox can't live out of HN as its sole userbase. Have you checked how much it costs to build and maintain a modern browser?
Plenty of users who have no money for TV or consoles, watch it on their laptop on low quality. I am one of those who watches Netflix on Linux Firefox :)
This isn't just any risk. It's an existential one for Firefox. You are asking them to make something that would be unpopular to the majority of its userbase at a point when they are borderline extinct. You are asking Mozilla to jeopardise Firefox for the same of a feature that YOU dislike enough to want to burn Firefox to the ground to get rid of it.
Yes I am asking them to have principles. I'm sorry this is such an insane concept to understand or appreciate. Maybe the next Mozilla will understand that having principles is not optional.
4 replies →
Yes, this is a no brainer. Whenever someone accesses NetFlix on a Firefox with no EME, just display a page which has a short description explaining why Firefox doesn't support EME ("EME is not included to protect your privacy as it allows websites to profile and identify you more easily") and provide a button to open Netflix either through a Netflix app or the pre-installed OS browser (Edge or Safari). Educate your users rather than treating everyone as dumb.
Or, reintroduce browser plugins (with permission based architecture).
>and provide a button to open Netflix either through a Netflix app or the pre-installed OS browser (Edge or Safari). Educate your users rather than treating everyone as dumb.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the overwhelming majority of users are going to install the app or use chrome. The average internet user is someone who thinks facebook and tiktok is spying on them but uses those apps anyways. What makes you think they'd take a stand on netfilx, of all things?
>Or, reintroduce browser plugins (with permission based architecture).
That's literally what EME is, with better sandboxing.
> It doesn't support Widevine l1 and never has.
Firefox supports Widevine Level 1 on Windows 11 devices with the requisite hardware and has for a year or so.
Not many providers other than Netflix support it still, but it does.
> Firefox supports Widevine Level 1 on Windows 11 devices with the requisite hardware and has for a year or so.
I am not familiar with the way Widevine works, but if that is true, there must be a way to hack that support into the Linux version. After all, the code is there and it should be possible to spoof hardware identifiers or whatever is needed to run Widevine on an open platform.
Sorry for any misinformation; I did try to quickly verify that this was still true, and I made the silly mistake of just assuming the Google AI Overview was good enough confirmation:
> Firefox does not support Widevine L1 (hardware-based DRM) on any operating system, and is restricted strictly to Widevine L3 (software-based DRM).
Tsk tsk, that one's on me.