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Discussion (8 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The alternative is that Netflix et. al can't be played on firefox and you need to install chrome just to watch it, which weakens firefox's market share even more.
I think this is because simply chasing Chrome didn't have the desired effect anyway. By doing so, Mozilla hurt Firefox by gradually reducing what differentiated it from Chrome in the first place, relegating it to be kind of just a worse Chrome that looks even weirder.
A similar statement would be something like, "Firefox may as well pledge to support Web Environment Integrity; otherwise, people will just use Chrome."
In a totally different vertical, Valve has made interesting choices. To my knowledge, they do not provide a way to do attestation on Steam hardware devices, so games that want to support Steam hardware simply have to get rid of their intrusive DRM and anti-cheat, or at least significantly loosen it. Depending on how you look at it, this has either been a massive success or a massive failure. After all, a lot of big games don't run; Fortnite, Valorant, etc. But on the other hand, it remains a very powerful incentive for publishers and developers to reconsider their choices, as these devices still do have a non-trivial marketshare. (And for smaller games this obviously is hard to ignore, probably often moreso than intrusive DRM.)
Mozilla may have been ultimately correct that the choices they made helped them stay relevant; it's hard to know for sure how much their marketshare would be different today if they made bolder choices, but in the long run I think it has doomed them, as it is now unclear what even really differentiates Firefox. The last remaining thing seems to just be that you can run the full version of uBlock Origin, which is pretty valuable and all, but I'm not sure it makes up for the deficiencies. (I also like Container Tabs, but I think that feature is pretty niche, possibly somewhat by virtue of the fact that Firefox is now pretty niche.)
I'm currently using Librewolf. My long term hope was that Ladybird would become the browser that does what Firefox should have, but when I asked Andreas Kling whether or not Ladybird would try to support EME/Widevine in an HN thread, there was no reply, which is pretty close to "probably".
That logic might work for firefox's product direction as a whole, but narrowly looking at the EME issue, what should have they done? If they didn't implement EME, then people will have to install chrome to watch netfilx. The users who are there as a matter of principle (eg. HN readers) might still use firefox as their daily driver, but they'd almost certainly lose some normies who were using firefox on inertia. Meanwhile because they refused to negotiate, they won't be able to influence the direction of the standard, which means no sandboxing of DRM modules and other privacy features. Both firefox and their users lose out in this scenario.
"Oh but firefox share is diminishing" yes, but it still exists. Or could be another browser