Incorrect. If Firefox had not put it in, nothing would have happened because programmers have (largely) decided to give chrome a majority market-share amongst them, and advocate it to their non-technical peers, increasing its market share amongst that group as well.

If programmers actually used firefox and advocated it to the point where it had a majority market share then maybe their refusal would carry some weight.

But as it stands the web dev community has said loud and clear what their priorities are, and this is just a natural consequence of that.

I don't understand anyone's desire to support a Google-backed browser.

I used to make an effort to use FF, but it gradually got slower, froze up more often, had problems with content I was viewing.

The final straw was when they had a big update. Instead of fixing any of these issues, they gave me the ability to call people with service I don't use by clicking a link :/

Similar boat here. I abandoned Firefox back in the day due to the memory and freezing problems, and general lack of responsiveness compared to Chrome. The difference in everyday use was massive here; we went from having a browser that could hardly handle having 3 tabs open while using a gigabyte of memory, to one that worked flawlessly and used a fraction of the resources. Firefox then put in a lot of effort fixing those issues. By this time though, Chrome's built-in DevTools was more robust for my tastes compared to Firebug or the horrific early versions of their built-in replacement. I had a good development setup, all the addons I needed, and a fast browser. I simply had little reason to switch back.

I did spend a brief period swapping back to Firefox for the sake of perceived privacy, but then they started bundling all sorts of third party bloatware and it was just too much. I'm not a superfan of the information I imagine Google collects from my using Chrome, but the browser itself is just too good to give up. Firefox now only gets opened to verify cross-browser functionality of frontend UIs I work on, and on rare occasions when I want to use a proxy in a browser without it being used system-wide.

I personally think that firefox got a lot better recently. I've been using ff dev since it launched, and it's been pretty good. And in speed tests, it's started to beat Chrome, although things may have since reversed.

But then, I'm not a web developer

>I'm not a superfan of the information I imagine Google collects from my using Chrome, but the browser itself is just too good to give up.

If you don't want to send information back to Google, don't use Chrome.

Use Chromium instead. It's Chrome, but without the spyware, and only has the open-source components.

It won't work for Netflix though, but for all your other browsing, it should work exactly the same as Chrome. Keep Chrome around for Netflix.

I've got chromium working for Netflix on Linux, haven't tried on windows though.

People might be less likely to use Chrome if it was branded as "the DoubleClick browser". :)

I also use FF in day-to-day both due to privacy concerns and general fitness for my style, but chrome's dev tools are objectively superior, you have to face it...

I do.

Browser can be either better technically, or you might have valency for certain design decisions.

If there is a browser vendors that claims certain social values, but is constantly failing to execute them in the design, you might as well just use the technically better one that does not pretend to protect the values you consider worth protecting. You will be spared of the constant disappointment.

When it was launched, Chrome/Chromium had 2 advantages over Firefox: Speed and superior developer tools.

Chrome was unbelievably quick: the moment you clicked on the launcher and browser 'chrome' (heh) appeared instantaneously, Firefox was comparatively sluggish, and notoriously memory hungry (though that might have been the fault of sloppily written plugins)

Speed mostly.

I don't have an issue with them including it, but to make it impossible to remove in an easy 1,2,3 clicks like you can with regular extensions is absolutely asinine. Browsers need to be more modular in this respect but I may be the minority with this opinion.

I wish browsers were more like uzbl, where the default were a simple browser and add-ons were like linux distros. You could have a firefox browser distro with a firefox branding and plugins to get great features but be able to remove them easily or strip it to its bare core.

It doesn't have to be. If consumers stop using EME-supporters' browsers, things can change quickly.

We have the power, but sadly not the will.

Actually it's not that hard:

1. Go to https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

2. Click on the largest version number (46.0.1 right now)

3. Select "EME-free" under your OS

4. Select your language of choice

For the lazy:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/46.0.1/mac-EME-...

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/46.0.1/win64-EM...

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/46.0.1/linux-x8...

This makes a difference. You won't be able to watch EME-locked content, but every time you try, a content publisher will have to come up with the resources to send you the page with the locked content, all to no avail.

Of course, you'll probably either cancel your Netflix or find a workaround. But you won't be casually supporting EME on sites you never knew were using it. Your every day browsing will automatically block EME.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore

You can turn it off in the options. From https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm

Opt out of CDM playback, uninstall CDMs and stop all CDM downloads

You have the choice to globally opt out of HTML5 DRM playback. Once you opt out, Firefox will delete any downloaded CDMs from your hard drive, cease all future CDM downloads and disable DRM playback. This affects only DRM-controlled HTML5 audio and video. To opt out of HTML5 DRM playback completely, follow these steps:

    Click the menu button  and choose Options.
    Click the Content panel.
    Remove the check mark next to Play DRM content.

No such option in Firefox 46.0 on Ubuntu 16.04.

EME is not enabled by default in Firefox on Linux.

For a normal user, the problem is that the Play DRM content checkbox is hidden by default.

In order to enable it, you must go to about:config and enable browser.eme.ui.enabled. While you are there, you can just disable media.eme.enabled and media.eme.apiVisible.

Are you on Linux? The "Play DRM content" checkbox is shown by default on Windows and Mac OS X.

The default for OSX is hidden - http://imgur.com/3AdT6Vs (46.0.1)

On Windows, it is shown indeed (45.1.1 ESR).

Thanks for the correction. I forgot that EME support (using Google's Widevine CDM) won't ship on OS X until Firefox 47, which is still in the Firefox Beta channel for another few weeks.

Thanks for the info.

On most Linux distributions, Firefox is built from source and then shipped via a package manager. At least on Arch, --disable-eme is not passed as a configure flag. Yes, one could build Firefox oneself, but it is a beast to compile. It is also ridiculous that this needs to be done at build time.

A perhaps easier approach that should work based on the name (but have not confirmed) is to lock via the user.js method user_pref/lockPref("media.eme.enabled", false). If this works as intended, then simply make this config file part of the deployment should be enough.

Guess which version will be packaged on the popular Linux distros.

Consumers have the power but not the knowledge. Users have the knowledge but not the power.

We don't like EME for technical reasons that the average consumer does not understand. Consumers will embrace EME because it connects them to content providers and not doing so would be like the linux users from over a decade ago who couldn't run flash.