Hacker News Reader

Comment by howeyc | Hacker News Reader

Right, they are using "their power to influence the development of the open web" by supporting DRM.

What's the point in having this power if you immediately cave?

Ding ding ding! You've hit the nail on the head.

Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise). Mozilla has an illusion of power, which is tolerated by the other actors because it makes everyone happy. But no one should mistake it for real leverage.

Exactly, Mozilla had power right up until the tech community sold out the future of the web in favor of sparkly things given to us by our benevolent corporate masters. Every time we installed Chrome for our parents because it was so minimal, every time we fired up safari because zomg the user interface was "lickable", we were working towards this point. We gave Google and Apple this power because we decided that smooth animations and per process tabs were a fair trade for the future of a global information network not controlled by corporate interests. Mozilla could have had real leverage if the tech community wasn't populated by a fashion driven divas with just enough foresight to see the tip of their own nose, but that isn't the world we live in.

> We gave Google and Apple this power because we decided that smooth animations and per process tabs were a fair trade for the future of a global information network not controlled by corporate interests.

Actually, I decided that hellacious startup times weren't worth it.

All of your hyperbole is a spin-master's way of saying that Chome and Safari beat out Mozilla because, for a significant amount of time, Firefox sucked compared to them.

Perhaps, but how important is DRM, with Chrome shipping it and even promoting it, to you, personally? Less important than having a nice startup time? Whatever floats your boat, but that seems to be a significant reason why we're here today.

This is why we can't have nice things. zomg v8 benchmarks, I must use Chrome now. Now we get DRM.

Mozilla has had real power for a brief period, when both MS and Google had their eyes off the ball. Once Chrome matured, the game was up. It didn't help that it took them ages to fix widespread performance problems in FF...

This said, if they go back to their roots as "ayatollah of open web and open source", I might consider them again; but until they're just another ad-backed bureaucracy, I might as well stick to a better one.

ayatollah of open web and open source

That's FSF. And guess what? Everyone hates it! [0]

Nicest thing about Mozilla is that they have a great balance of ideology and being practical.

[0] Of course not everyone, specially not me. But you get my point.

Mozilla was never "ayatollah of open web and open source". If it has been, firefox would have never been available on Windows, like some people at the time argued.

Google did well technically on Chrome, but investing a huge amount of marketing dollars (like bundling chrome with other nice things like toolbars) didn't hurt them.

Well, even emacs is available for Windows. I guess not even ayatollahs are that extreme.

They may concede if they think it will help their great goal.

Mozilla still has some power, but they don't think they have enough to mount a lone assault on video DRM. I'm inclined to agree with them.

But I'd rather they saved that power for the next fight rather than going kamikaze on this. I'm sure there will be a next fight, and there's a good chance that it will be something smaller, or they'll have another major browser on their side.

> Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise).

That's not right either. It's the users that have the power. Users can pick which browsers they use and which sites they visit.

There was essentially no boycott of EME-shipping browsers (Chrome and Internet Explorer). That shows that we, the people on the internet, did not care enough to fight EME.

EME isn't fought by talking about it and hoping someone like Mozilla will kill it. We would have had to actually do something ourselves, and a successful boycott of Chrome and Internet Explorer would have killed EME very effectively.

> There was essentially no boycott of EME-shipping browsers (Chrome and Internet Explorer).

Or most users weren't aware of their choices. Mozilla could have campaigned to make users aware of it and go back to Firefox. Instead they chose the other direction. :-(

It's hard to mobilize people. There were top stories here on HN about EME when Chrome and Internet Explorer started to ship it, it did get a lot of attention, and HN is a pretty good place for internet activism. But even here, basically nothing happened.

I've talked about this for a long time and tried to convince people about it. People just don't seem to care. I'm surprised at how much attention this is getting now, all of a sudden!

Given that most Chrome users installed it because of the deal with flash or advertising on the Google home page, and updates are silent, it's safe to assume very few of them have any idea what is being introduced or when or what the implications are.

That's pretty much Google's business model, as it was for Microsoft before them: get more market share by making it just a little bit harder to use your competitors.

Er, you claim Google has power. What if Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple implemented EME but Google didn't want to, and then everyone stopped using Chrome for all of the reasons mentioned in this thread? Then, Google doesn't have power. Contradiction!

No. Google has power because it has influence outside of web browsers. Mozilla have basically no leverage - their product is at best highly competitive with a number of other choices. If Firefox becomes irrelevant, Mozilla as an organisation dies - no money to pay the bills. If Chrome becomes irrelevant, Google's still very much a functioning company.

The organization dying or not is off topic. We're talking about which company has the clout to stop the DRM via not implementing it in their browser. Surely Chrome would die out just like Firefox would if Google decided to Do No Evil here. Chrome/Google would fail to stop the DRM, so Chrome/Google didn't have power.

Or do you think that because of Android or something, Google would be able to stop the DRM when every other browser/device supported it?

That's very true. And as more and more people move away from Firefox due to Mozilla's bad design decisions as of late, their limited influence diminishes even further. Their 15% to 20% share of the browser market just can't compare to IE's 20% or more, never mind Chrome's 40% or more.

"pride goeth before a a fall"

It was just a few years ago that Mozilla though so highly of themselves that they thought they could use their market position to force the world to change from h.264 to VP3 (with hopes that Google would gift the world VP8 later on).

They failed at reading the situation then, and are failing again now.

The world wasn't using h.264, it was being forced to move to h.264, and Mozilla eventually caved, like they're caving now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com