On 15/05/14 15:01, Jim wrote: > Mozilla sold out for fear of losing market share. You didn't even try to > make a case to users to stick with Firefox if they were forced to use an > alternative browser to view some media content.
I for one can't even begin to think how we could have made such a case. In my experience, for users, "Firefox can't play my video" translates "Firefox is broken", which in turns translates at best to "I'll wait for a patch" and at worst to "I'll change browser". > Windows users already > have IE installed and you could have just deferred to IE for content > requiring EME - users have already chosen to use Firefox over IE so see > value in Firefox. There was a proposal made at the W3C that would have > further mitigated concerns of losing market share but Mozilla was not > interested. I may be misunderstanding your suggestion, but this looks like a lose/lose situation: 1/ using Firefox becomes more complicated and less stable for users who wish to read videos; 2/ our code becomes harder to write, maintain and test because it now depends on (presumably) IE and Safari and Chrome for Android; 3/ we abandon Linux users; 4/ Firefox OS users never get to see videos; 5/ our users still end up running proprietary closed box software; 6/ instead of said closed box software running in a sandbox, it runs with whichever privileges Microsoft/Apple/Google decided to use. >> Where was the internet outrage when Microsoft and Google implemented >> this in their browsers? Where was the outrage towards Hollywood >> studios asked for this? The fact that people at large simply let them >> get away with this silently is ultimately what is forcing our hand >> here. > > The average web user might not understand how evil this decision is. Well, yes, that's the core of the problem. Users are not aware of the perils of DRM. We all need to work on both education and alternatives. That's the real battlefield. But deciding 1/ to be the only browser on which movies cannot be played or 2/ to use the approach discussed a above – neither helps. > The question for the Mozilla community is what to do now. Will the > Mozilla leadership go quietly if they are voted out? Or do we need to > fork off development to a separate organization? Well, you can certainly fork Firefox to your heart's content – or simply deactivate the proprietary components, or use IceWeasel, etc. There are plenty of options. Best regards, David -- David Rajchenbach-Teller, PhD Performance Team, Mozilla
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