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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising at all.

Yeah this feels very much the point of DRM in browsers. I will never understand why Firefox caved. This is 100% the kind of thing they should fight.

In this day and age I dont understand why there isnt a more successful fork of firefox or a new opensource browser thats more succesful with privacy as a concern. My only speculation is collective lazyness and lack of sex appeal as new technologies have emerged. I’m probably biased as I lived through the browser wars. I guess I’m probably projecting combined with curiosity. I know most of the old greybeards have moved on and those of us left are stuck carrying the torch, but man it sure seems the culture has been eroded significantly. Case in point back in my day it seemed like there was a new browser every few months or so. I’m done ranting, I’ve got kids to yell at to get off my lawn.

WebKit seems to be doing at least some of that, rejecting some of the more invasive new web APIs. Why does my browser ever need to know my battery status?

I don't understand why anyone would bother forking Firefox when forking Chromium is available which is more advanced and more modular.

>or a new opensource browser

Brave browser fulfills that role.

https://brave.com/compare/firefox-vs-brave/

> I don't understand why anyone would bother forking Firefox when forking Chromium is available which is more advanced and more modular.

No uBlock is a deal breaker. Chromium is stuck with the neutered uBlock Lite thanks to Manifest V3.

> Brave browser fulfills that role

Sure, and it's also funded by VC money. How long until the vultures start swooping in to get a return on their investiment?

>No uBlock is a deal breaker.

Why? If a browser is able to performantly and accurately block ads, why should the exact extention matter.

>and it's also funded by VC money

Which allowed them to properly invest into building out the browser and search engine.

>return on their investiment?

Controlling the home page / search of a web browser is extremely valuable.

Brave is such a browser but seeing as it is backed by Thiel's VC money and involves a crypto monetization incentive for the user (which can easily be turned off, btw) it evokes strong emotions in people who are rightly averse to such things. However, it does do pretty much everything privacy advocates ask for as soon as you turn off a few settings. I use it and would recommend it for people who want a anti-tracking, anti-ad browser if you can live with the drama around it.

Many forks exist like LibreWolf

LibreWolf isn't a real fork. It's a patch set on top of firefox, meaning they are still beholden to any design decisions in the upstream project that can't easily be patched out.

I’ve been running Waterfox[1] for over 14 years and it’s as popular as ever.

1: https://www.waterfox.net

And the first screenshot on that website shows Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, etc. Real privacy champions.

At the end of the day, before implementing support for streaming services via DRM, this was the most requested feature.

Privacy is a sliding scale and the idea that it's absolute privacy or nothing else isn't helpful IMO. If people want that, they should use Tor as nothing comes close.

They "caved" because it's a browser for humans and lots of humans stream TV. I don't miss the daily "how can I watch Netflix on Ubuntu?" posts in different communities. Users can disable Widevine in FF.

I’d be surprised if close to 100% of those users aren’t using Chrome, not Firefox for any streaming purposes.

You'd be surprised if less-than 99% of Firefox users didn't switch to Chrome to stream television? Am I understanding?

I think the number of people who care about streaming DRM media probably already used Chrome at the time of the EME stuff being added to Firefox.

People do this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294402

So they use Firefox 99% of the time and then if they encounter the rare thing that requires DRM they treat it like toxic waste that has to run in an isolated sandbox, which doesn't need to be the same browser they use for anything else.

The only other sensible option is to get out the reversing toolkit and break the DRM.

It's unlikely we can extrapolate market share and user-base data from individuals who self-select into discussing DRM on Hackernews.

Aren't those the only people who don't already use Chrome? "People who hate privacy-invading stuff like DRM" is pretty much the Firefox user base.

Better than extrapolating market share from your feelings.

There is absolutely no way I would be able to convince my parents to do streaming that way, and I'm reasonably certain that they're a much more representative set of the community than people who hang around HN.

You absolutely would and it's the default way that normal people actually do it, which is to isolate Netflix into some kind of TV or HDMI stick instead of putting it in a browser on a PC.

Sure, when they are at home. They use laptops to watch Netflix when they travel, and I am quite confident that if Netflix didn't work on Firefox they would assume it is broken and then switch to Chrome.

Your parents are likely to use the Netflix app on the TV instead of FF anyway.

The answer should be "go sail the high seas."

Cool story. Except you still can't watch Netflix on Ubuntu unless you are OK being a second class citizen who is only allowed resolutions that may have been acceptable a century ago. So congratulations, FF sold out for nothing.

This is the point? Not preventing screen capture?

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