People have the freedom to disagree with you, FSF. Just because they do doesn't make them misguided, especially on a future prediction.
How is this any different from flash/silverlight plugins we already have?
If Joe Sixpack or Aunt Tilly uses firefox, wants to watch Netflix, and can't because of this, they're going to switch to Chrome. They won't understand why, and won't care even if they did. I'd have thought the FSF would be more concerned about them potentially switching to Chrome in that use case...
How is Chrome(/Chromium) worse than Firefox, if the latter starts encouraging DRM?
If the FSF should compromise their principles for this, should they have also encouraged everyone to use KDE back when Qt was proprietary?
How about admitting that GIF, despite being patent-encumbered, was OK to use because there it was on so many Geocities sites?
Shoud we all give in and sign patent licenses, so that we can access all of those Bzip1 files?
Maybe we should stop improving our Javascript engines, since clearly Flash won the battle for Web multimedia.
Heck, we could increase the average level of user Freedom if we stopped all of this distracting GNU/Linux/BSD busy-work and concentrated all development effort on developing our Windows and Mac builds.
Clearly no. The FSF have been playing this game for 30 years; they're in it for the long haul.
Because chrome will too for exactly the same reason Firefox has, but chrome comes with the bonus of tracking the user's activity, creating profiles, and sending pseudonymised data back to google, which with google's analytics and profiles, is as good as personally identifiable to them as they can just link it to maps, gmail, youtube, etc to get a full profile.
Don't you think it's a bit odd that the premise is to "trick" users into using Firefox by luring them in with promises of Netflix support? What's the point of this, and what precedent does it set? These are the issues we need to think about, rather than just saying things like "oh no Mozilla is losing all it's users" and other silly doomsday predictions.
If you have some magic trick for doing it, go ahead.
A majority of people are stupid. They don't care about their privacy, they use chrome because google advertise it, they leak data everywhere they go, and either don't care, or are imbecilic enough to believe "If you've got nothing to hide, it doesn't matter".
In a way, HN acts as a reality distortion field if you get the bulk of your news from here, because people here are likely to make well researched comments with thought behind them; which makes it easy to forget that a lot of the world's population is very stupid and/or apathetic about most issues.
They won't switch because they are already using Chrome.
Most Firefox users I know (perhaps I'm biased?) do so not because it's the best browser (it is absolutely not!) but because of Mozilla Foundation's values.
Nope. Most people don't care about that or in fact prefer Chrome's non-customizable UI.
> and better privacy (separate search bar and URL bar, keystrokes not sent to Google as "partial searches" by default)?
That's what I meant with "Mozilla Foundation's values".
Increased privacy is very much a direct benefit for a user and it is a real factor that contributes to the utility of FF.
Although TBH there aren't many alternatives (open source, doesn't support DRM), other than a fork of Firefox itself without the DRM bits.
I think the EFF put it right https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/mozilla-and-drm "Baker may think that Mozilla cannot change the industry on its own (despite it having done so many years ago). Sadly, it changes the industry by accepting DRM."
Mozilla just told all its users to install IE, Chrome or Safari.
To your second point: If you install IE or Chrome the DRM system will be part of your browser and you have something out of your control running on your system whether you want to watch DRMed content or not.
With Firefox you can just keep using the web, and as long as you never want to watch any DRMed content, nothing changes for you. Only if you want to watch DRMed content will you be asked to download a plugin. As the cherry on top, Firefox will not leak identfiable data about your video usage to DRM or content providers.
Unfortunately Mozilla alone can't stand against the power of Google, Apple, Mircrosoft, Amazon, Netflix and others united in their desire to push DRM through, but if you can't see the difference between Mozilla and the others, I don't think there is anything I can say to change your mind.
It's a W3C standard, for one. Whereas Flash/Silverlight are completely third-party, EME can be argued to be "browser-endorsed" or "web standards-endorsed" to a degree.
More for concerned citizens.
There is a difference between add-on code for particular proprietary content platforms, and writing DRM support into the web standard. Not implementing a Flash plugin doesn't break compliance with the 'official' browser standards - not bunging in the EME stuff will, presuming it gets fully adopted.
That, as I understand it, is the real point of controversy in this whole thing - whether DRM belongs in web standards. Mozilla was fighting it, uniquely among major browser vendors so far as I know; this move means that they've basically given in.
Whether they are right or wrong to do so is another matter.
When I click play on a movie in Chrome, I don't know (or care) whether it's using Chrome's embedded Flash or an "open" HTML5 video tag or some crazy proprietary thing. I only care when it doesn't work.
Are not the hundreds of people who responded to this thread citizens of somewhere or other?
Are they not concerned?
In the absence of evidence, I don't see how claiming those fears are misguided is any less valid than claiming that they are well founded. I'm not really sure what argument you're making here.
If video support is so important, why don't they prioritize that over this DRM thing?