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Comment by sutro | Hacker News Reader

Here's hoping that a viable non-Mozilla group emerges that will offer a DRM-disabled version of Firefox, one that is addon-compatible and which pulls in all non-DRM-related upstream changes. Mozilla has lost my support over this decision.

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It seems like you are describing an oxymoron. It's not possible to create a browser that both supports plugins, but disables DRM. Plug-ins (assuming you are referring to the NPAPI) by definition can do anything they want, and in fact are used today to implement DRM in the form of Silverlight and Flash (RTMPE). Think of this as an alternative <object> tag, that doesn't allow arbitrary plugins, but one very specific to encode and decode audio/video.

Fun fact, if you have used Youtube, you have probably consumed DRMed content via Flash's RTMPE support.

I meant addons and extensions, not native code plugins. I have all plugins including flash disabled, so no, I don't consume DRM content via Youtube or any other site.

offer a DRM-disabled version of Firefox, one that is plugin-compatible

These two things are 100% contradictory, and the fact that they are so is the entire point of the discussion of adding EME/CDM support. You might want to try to understand the situation before you make comments as "Mozilla has lost my support over this decision."

I meant addon/extension-compatible in the Firefox parlance, not plugin compatible, and have edited my comment to clarify that. At your prompting I've now read up on the details and I'm glad that users will be able to deny the Adobe download. I incorrectly assumed that would happen automatically.

The announcement explains that Firefox continues free of any DRM code, and users who want access to it will have to explicitly opt-in to download it.

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