It seems like it’d be beneficial to many web publishers if browser users couldn’t easily access underlying resources, and those companies could incentivize popular vendors to go in that direction (and every decent browser auto-updates, of course). Suddenly bypassing Flickr’s spaceball becomes too complicated for regular user.

On the other hand, no one would bother with that in a world where non-mobile computers are increasingly becoming developer-only machines, so this is probably just mild paranoia.