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Comment by mehrdada | Hacker News Reader

To me, Mozilla jumped the shark when they did not take a principled stance against web DRM. At that point, to me, their raison d'être of advocating the open web was meaningless, since today, in contrast of when they started, the most popular browser is an open-source product anyway and there is a relatively healthy ecosystem of decentralized power across commercial companies in place to check and balance each other. The place where it breaks and a non-profit model would have been helpful was pushing back on DRM, but Mozilla chose to play along sacrificing its principles for popularity as any other commercial entity would.

This is why people like Richard Stallman who don't compromise on principles are critically important.

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They did take that kind of principled stand and it hurt them. Firefox was late to support H.264 for that reason and users reacted by switching to Chrome where videos Just Worked. Mozilla resisted EME but that didn't delay DRM in any way, it just meant that everyone kept using Flash/Silverlight DRM or switched to a browser which didn't require them to install plugins to play video.

Getting users to make decisions in favor of openness is an unsolved problem and it's why Richard Stallman, while laudable for acting on principle, has increasingly little impact. Rather than hectoring Mozilla for not committing suicide, your efforts should be directed to figuring out how to get ordinary people to make different buying decisions so groups like Mozilla aren't faced with the decision between standing up for principles and having users.

Mozilla did take a principled stand against DRM. It proposed an alternative to EME that involved watermarking content rather than client-side DRM. But the combination of Google, Microsoft, and Netflix was enough to win over the W3C, and by the time that the developer community at large finally got up in arms about it (late 2012, early 2013) it was already too late to change course; by that point, Chrome was already shipping EME for use with Netflix. The tragedy is that Mozilla did try, and nobody cared. And, frankly, even if they had cared, I don't think any amount of dev outrage would actually counter such an influential industry consortium (but maybe I'm just cynical).

> And, frankly, even if they had cared, I don't think any amount of dev outrage would actually counter such an influential industry consortium (but maybe I'm just cynical).

I don't think the industry consortium is really even that relevant here; it was proposed to the W3C in Feb 2012 jointly by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, and already had a fairly well fleshed out proposal. It was shipped in Chrome, with Netflix supporting it, little over a year later. I'm fairly certain those three companies would've gone ahead with it regardless of what the outcome of the W3C proposal was.

Let's be honest here, though. You're not the target market if you're willing to change browsers on philosophical principle.

Principles are fine and dandy until you have to commit suicide to maintain them. Given the good Mozilla does as a going concern, becoming "that one weird browser that can't play your videos" would just result in more people using Chrome and Edge.

This kinda reminds me of the GCC/Clang thing. If I recall right, Clang got a huge influx of attention, in part, due to Stallman's unwillingness to allow GCC to export its AST.

Perhaps we need a rule for this. "The tech community interprets developer obstinance as damage, and routes around it."

"This kinda reminds me of the GCC/Clang thing. If I recall right, Clang got a huge influx of attention, in part, due to Stallman's unwillingness to allow GCC to export its AST. "

This is one of a number of reasons, yes.

For me it was declaring they'd build in an ad blocker, then backtrqcking. Mozilla's positioning was that of "best interests of the user". This double take exposed them that they were for advertisers first and foremost.

Chrome is closed source.

This. So much this, I felt like Mozilla's fall along with their increased marketing push a few years ago about "being open" and "values driven". Don't get me wrong, I think people should speak loudly about that, but for them it seemed to become propaganda to compensate their lack of real values-oriented action. This was multiple encounters and touch points that I saw/experienced over a few years, so sad.

And then there was also that whole Eich purge fiasco.

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