> This isn't some evil plot, it's just fallout from Chrome removing support for third-party plugins and thus the plugin management UI
So instead it's just a fallout from an earlier plot that is no less evil than this one appears to be.
So instead it's just a fallout from an earlier plot that is no less evil than this one appears to be.
W3C is more to blame that all of them, as they have violated their mission statement with EME and DRM
If something is standard complaint it should work for all platforms that support the standard not just the Billion dollar corporations that paid to get their technology included into the standard
Blame the media industry for forcing it.
If Google was only implementing DRM to tick boxes, they wouldn't be implementing "extracurriculars" like hardware-based DRM on ChromeOS devices.
They wouldn't own the very DRM company whose product they're peddling, a company which advertises to the very industry which is supposedly forcing Google's hand. http://www.widevine.com/
Take a look at this page and search for 'HW_SECURE_ALL': http://www.widevine.com/product_news.html
Now, what exactly is the point in implementing a more secure DRM variant (which as far as I can tell uses remote attestation) if content remains available to more 'vulnerable' platforms? We even have a potential lockin motive by Google here, too. I can see it now: "Only available on ChromeOS."
No, I'll blame the ad company pushing it into the browser.
Don't get me wrong, my beloved firefox is not better. It wants me to install dev edition to be able to install anything.
We made a mistake somewhere along the way.
The browser vendors then get to take all the "credit" for that. Their decision to remove support for external plugins is absolutely reasonable.
That being said, I wish there was a way I could use unsigned plugins easily, without reinstalling firefox.
The modern browser 1. is its own OS, but 2. doesn't have any concept of a privilege-level separation. That means any random program running as user X is free to install an extension into user X's Chrome or Firefox profile without needing to ask permission. And then said extension can harvest your social-network profiles, replace ads with their own, etc.
Modern operating systems have a concept of users, groups of users and dedicating one of these to the role of administrator. I see no problem in not enforcing signing rule for the extensions installed by administrator (at system-wide locations, not user profile) - they are read only for the rest of the users anyway, so they couldn't be installed by drive-by malware. Power users are happy, naive users are protected.
If there is a malware that looks like installed by administrator, you have much bigger problems anyway. That malware could patch the firefox binary in the same way as it could deploy the extension, so you gained exactly nothing.
But the current situation just makes power users unhappy. This policy killed some extensions that were shipped by Linux distributions.
I though this change was only about Windows? Chrome on Linux lets me load unsigned extensions just fine.
Apparently the major browser vendors' solution to the problem of things running as users breaking the browser is to remove the ability for users to do things. This is a bogus solution.
See: Firefox's chrome-ification of the plugin system.
The feature was actively abused my malware so I guess this does makes sense.