Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

>How is Chrome(/Chromium) worse than Firefox, if the latter starts encouraging DRM?

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.

Then the users need to be educated about those things too.

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.

>Then the users need to be educated about those things too.

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.

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