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Comment by news12klm | Hacker News Reader

They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?

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This is where these guys lose me. There is no way you get Netflix or Hulu or Disney in Firefox without EME or something similar. Ultimately the question is do you want to be a mainstream browser or not? Obviously Mozilla does and most people want it to be and don't care about it. If you don't like copy protection then don't buy stuff with it or torrent instead. This is such a tired argument to be having in 2020 and boring complaint about Mozilla.

Of course, I keep EME disabled everywhere anyway.

Intellectual purity isn't good for the end user.

DRM isn't good for the end user.

I dont think EME was a mistake. It sucks, but they didnt have a choice, if the choice is death or EME.

FireFox and Chrome can't even stream Netflix or Amazon at 1080p. It's like they capitulated and still lost. I watch Netflix in their own app on Windows because even though Edge will technically stream 1080p, it seems to be rate limit capped with noticeable quality reduction :|

> would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS

Yeah, in a heartbeat. I actually never used Netflix and probably never will. I won't be be party to destroying what is good and not-like-TV about the web, for the sake of stuff that is like TV, and usually is less interesting to me than even silence.

How does Netflix hurt not-Netflix?

How does unfreedom hurt freedom? In that any given person cannot be in several places of the freedom spectrum at the same time. If they're a serf, a mere set of eyeballs and a wallet, they cannot be a grown literate human being in an information age also. If a person prefers to be illiterate and have stories read to them, they cannot be an author, or an investigative journalist. If another person prefers to be their master, rather than their peer or at least an unrelated stranger, they likewise aren't free, since all leashes cut both ways.

Computers are powerful enough these days to have multiple browsers installed and running simultaneously. One could have used Firefox for general browsing and just used Chrome for Netflix.

Power users might do it, but most people don't.

There are enough power users in the world to keep Firefox relevant.

Judging from market share, does anyone who's not a power user even run Firefox these days? I know I stopped religiously installing it on non-nerd relatives' computers and stopped evangelizing it to my friends years ago, when it stopped being a clear usability and safety win. They're certainly not installing it themselves.

[EDIT] basically I have no reason to bother a friend or relative to install Firefox if they're gonna open it and go "well, that's... fine". Non-nerds could immediately tell Phoenix/Firebird/early-FF were better than IE. For real. These days, to convince my uncle to install FF instead of Edge, what's the sell? What about FF makes it seem to them like I didn't just make them do this for no reason? Unless you also install some extensions, the only difference is that they advertise different add-on services at you. If FF doesn't make bold choices that improve the default browsing experience, I have no reason whatsoever to recommend them to non-nerds, or to install FF when I set up a computer for someone, or whatever.

To this day they do provide a toggle in settings to turn EME off, so its not as if it is compelled on the user.

This is what I do currently. I use Chrome or Brave to access Google sites only, and use Firefox for all other activity. I never sign in to any Google account from Firefox. For me it doesn't feel inconvenient at all to just click the Brave icon when I want to check Gmail and I like segregating my Google activity as much as possible.

I don't want to use Chrome though

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