What good is Firefox if it doesn't have integrity?

I can't tell if this is satire. Does anyone seriously believe that surrendering the war when you've lost one battle is an intelligent strategy? Mozilla contributes a whole lot to OSS, including providing a browser that can be trivially used without any black-box DRM-enforcement code hitting your system.

I didn't mean to suggest I categorically disagreed with the decision, in this case. I simply note that you can't extend that logic indefinitely, or you lose the thing you're fighting for.

You are free to run Firefox without the DRM module.

True that. Time to start using Firefox forks. Pale Moon, Iceweasel, GNU Icecat.

Maybe go even further outside the box, use gngr: https://gngr.info/

Exactly. The whole point of Firefox is to be the browser that actually protects its users. If I wanted DRM shoved down my throat, I'd be using Chrome.

> What good is integrity if nobody uses Firefox ? That was the main reason they added EME support in the first place.

This was rather the point of Fall of Men ("Zeitpunkt des Sündenfalls") in Firefox' history to me. It was also the point in time where I stopped donating to them.

And what's your solution (proposal) for the problem they faced?

> And what's your solution (proposal) for the problem they faced?

Make the zero-tolerance for DRM a unique selling point of Firefox.

Firefox is, AFAIK, the only browser vendor that decouples the EME module from the browser, allowing the browser to be downloaded without any DRM support at all. See the various "EME-free" directories here: http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/55.0/

The normal (not the "EME-free" ones) builds download the Widevine CDM from Google shortly after being run. The EME-free builds have a boolean pref pre-flipped, so that it doesn't download the Widevine CDM unless you manually flip the pref the other way. If you download a non-"EME-free" build and flip the pref, Firefox deletes the Widevine CDM if it already downloaded it.

In summary, if you already have Firefox, you don't need to go download a separate build to opt out of DRM. You can just uncheck the "Play DRM-controlled content" checkbox in the prefs to get to the same configuration.

Interesting, I didn't realize they did this. I guess they've been doing it since EME support landed[0] in 2015, but it sounds like they opted to not really publicize it. I always just set media.eme.enabled to false when I configure a new profile, but I hadn't really considered that this does not prevent the DRM libraries from being automatically downloaded.

[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1144903

That design decision makes sense, to decouple the EME module, and great that Mozilla offers a prebuilt binary without it, as an opt-out. I wonder if Chromium (or a fork) can also be built without this feature?

I'm not sure what decoupling means, and whether it's of any technical significance beyond bragging rights, but chromium won't support drm out of the box either because widevine is obviously not a part of chromium. You can take the widevine library from chrome and make it work with chromium if you jump through some hoops.

Not sure how it works on other OSs, but in my experience on Linux, Chromium is installed without Widevine DRM, Flash, or any proprietary stuff, and if you want that you have to install it separately.

I'm not sure "doesn't work with most major video sites" is an actual selling point.

> I'm not sure "doesn't work with most major video sites" is an actual selling point.

You just have to reframe it to something like: "protects you against websites that try to plant DRM-malware on your computer".

"... And by the way you can't use the streaming services you pay for."