On Friday 31 January 2025 01:50:52 am George at Clug wrote: > Does anyone use Firefox to watch DRM protected Video content? > > Is it normal for DRM to display lots of ads whenever Firefox is > loaded? > > I did enable DRM once, a long time ago, and I started getting annoying > ads whenever Firefox was loaded. It took a while for me to determine > it was because of the DRM add-on. The DRM add-on was loaded into the > user's file space. I do not know if displaying the ads was normal DRM > add-on behavour or whether a malisious web page had replaced the > originally downloaded DRM file with a hacked version. My solution at > the time was to delete any Firefox folders in my /home/username area > (e.g. ~/.mozilla/firefox). DRM was not too important to me, so I now > just do not enable DRM. > > > https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm > Firefox for desktop supports the Google Widevine CDM for playing > DRM-controlled content. > > Disabling Google Widevine from the Add-ons Manager prevents it from > running on your computer and prevents future updates from downloading. > > > Please reply if you have had any such experiences. I run firefox with a number of add-ons, including adblock plus, ublock origin, privacy badgerm and cookie autodelete. Not the most current version, but that will change once I complete the transition to the new machine.
If I want to see something on the web, I'll look for it, and bring it up myself. That means that to me the web is a "pull" medium. Unfortunately there seems to be an awful lot of folks out there that consider the web to be a "push" medium, like traditional mass media advertising. But it just doesn't work that way. And those who choose to get really obnoxious about this stuff are those that I will eventually decide not to do any business with, given any kind of a choice. There was some guy, I can't remember his name, quoted in a magazine article some years back who grudgingly admitted that it was okay to record copyrighted material on your vcr for the purposes of time shifting it, but he said you really weren't allowed to fast forward past the commercials! Right... As far as DRM is concerned, I've never really had any desire to view such stuff. Very occasionally I'll get some sort of a popup telling me that I must enable DRM to view some of the content on the page that I've just loaded, or am in the process of loading. I will usually just close that popup without doing any enabling of the sort, and for the most part I don't have any problem viewing whatever media is on that page. My attitude toward this is that if they're gonna design their web page to make it more difficult to view things, that's their loss, and I will find my information elsewhere. Eventually maybe people will figure this out, and those who design web pages will get a clue, but that might take a long time. In the meantime there sure seems to be a lot of badly designed web stuff out there, and thankfully I can manage to avoid it for the most part. My most recent add-on is noscript. Some web pages simply won't work until you tell the noscript add-on that they're "trusted" (or perhaps "temp trusted"), at which point they work, sometimes it takes a bit more than that. In a few cases I get a banner across the bottom of the screen telling me that to use the site javascript must be enabled. But the page displays just fine, which has me wondering just what it is that they're trying to do with that javascript that I'm not running. These banners often being an annoying bright red, I'll typically remove them with the nuke anything add-on and that takes care of that. :-) -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin
