I will begrudgingly admit he has a point here. In a few years I imagine almost all sites will refuse to serve anything without WEI, and the "open" web will be the preserve of a few hobbyists. Annoyingly you'll still need to use a compromised browser (or worse, app) to do anything with your bank, etc.

It will be something like WEI or sites will just be a giant blob served via WebASM.

> the "open" web will be the preserve of a few hobbyists.

And maybe that will be the Web healing. If all the value extraction moves elsewhere, we might finally have a sane web of hypertext documents again.

Unless that is labeled the new darkweb and blocked by the firewalls of ISPs and govs.

I hope enough mainstream things remain on the open web for it to be unrealistic to fully block.

Maybe, but I suspect it will be more like trying to access Usenet now.

I dunno. Considering the balkanization of the web maybe I should get in to ham radio or something.

Yes, the kneejerk reaction against FF here isn't really thinking things through. Mozilla has to walk this tight rope since ad companies own the web already.

Realistically, the best outcome at this point is that enough users are willing to send enough data to advertisers so they allow the open web to continue.

The alternative is that sites will eventually only work in Chrome or Safari on limited, locked down platforms (read: no Linux support at all).

DRM on a website = no search engine can scan the website = no users = the DRM website dies.

Which is one of the main reasons why it’s such a problem that the search engine with an overwhelming market share also owns the browser with overwhelming market share and is also the largest online ad company. Not to mention they pay billions each year to the other browsers. Google has a huge amount of control over every part of this.

google is the owner of the DRM verification system, they add exception for google robots, website only appears on google, kills other search engines in the process

You’ll notice that Google search now shows excerpts from things you can’t actually see visiting the site (paywalled news, paywalled scientific articles). The age of “show us exactly what users see or get downranked into oblivion” is long gone, sadly.

If the DRM is coming from Google, I'm sure they'll take that into consideration when designing it. Feels ripe for an anti-trust lawsuit, but IANAL so who knows.

With that logic, wouldn't Widevine DRM already be ripe for an antitrust lawsuit? Genuine question.

When I wrote the comment I was imagining Google using the tech as a moat to stop other search engines from indexing DRM protected content. I guess if they shared it and "all" search engines could index the content, it would probably be fine? I'm guessing that's why Widevine is "fine".

But like I said, I'm not a lawyer and have no idea what I'm talking about.

It would be if antitrust regulators were not asleep.

EU would destroy them.

Which is why it hasn't rolled out yet. Once this is solved, you bet your ass they will start rolling it out.

> leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win

So we're not even going to try.

This is an attempt to try. You don't win my being an immovable wall going against the biggest corporations. If the W3C manages to create a system that satisfies advertisers while preserving our privacy, that's how you win. There isn't a future where advertising will just disappear. I'm just being pragmatic here, as a user of ad blockers for 15 years.

It's not an attempt to try, it's reputation management. There is no 'anonymization' of data, because the advertising companies Mozilla is selling your data to now have almost 20 years of profiling that can effectively identify people through "anonymous" results. This has been known for years. Mozilla knows. They don't care.

Most advertisers will not be satisfied with that. The real question is if regulators will be and therefore can use this as a reason to clamp down on advertisers. If so this might work, but I am skeptical. And either way it was wrong of Mozilla to sneak this in as opt-out.

An immovable wall is exactly what is needed to confront big corporations when they behave abusively (and intrusive profiling is an example of this). 'Pragmatism' here is just acquiescence in creeping surrender. Look what advertising has already done to the web and privacy.

What's already happening is that websites are Si ply dropping support for Firefox.

I can see the economic argument, but I am not sure that I buy it. W3C could push this as a standard, but surely anything that is privacy preserving will by its very definition provide less data for advertisement targeting, no? With less data, the targeting is likely to be worse in terms of advertisement efficiency. Thus, the economic incentive even in an ideal situation as with a W3C standard will be pushing any advertiser to "betray" the system and fall back on the very arms race that Mozilla is arguing that they are trying to avoid, no?

At best, politicians could jump on the "solution", but then why are Mozilla not already lobbying in that case? Why is the first party they are reaching out to the wolf in this drama?

Regardless, Mozilla has lost me at this point as a user. This being opt-out is inexcusable and I will find ways to gravitate away from them as I should not need my poor package maintainers to be paranoid with their upstream code in the same way they have to be with Chrome in order to protect us from developer abuse like this. Will try Mull on mobile now, hopefully it is viable, and see how I solve the desktop situation when I can find the time.

Except being uncompromising is exactly how free software won. And compromising on EME DRM did not make websites using that DRM any less restricted to popular platforms. Compromise is not a winning move when what you are fighting against is fundamentally unacceptable.

Which will lead to counter moves by alterative browsers and websites and Google risking the loss of browser market share. If you think this is unthinkable, just look back at Microsoft's dominance of the browser market twenty years ago. Exactly like Google is doing they were pushing through all sorts of user hostile stuff via internet explorer. Before Chrome came along, Firefox was one of the few holdouts against them. Internet explorer users were dealing with all sorts of crap. Popups, popunders, all sorts of viruses, cross site scripting attacks, etc. Mostly that was just a mix of poorly designed features but there was also MS trying to get into search and advertising and they were trying to abuse their defacto monopoly to do that.

I don’t disagree with you in principle, but this history is not quite right. IIRC the IE6 team was shut down. Basically only Mozilla and Apple were building browsers at scale until Chrome came along.

I might be misremembering?

Yes, you are definitely missing a decade here. The internet explorer/edge team was shut down long after Google grabbed most of the market share.

Chrome was launched 2008; Safari had its first release in 2003. And I was using the early Phoenix builds (later the name change to Firefox happened) in 2001. The version of internet explorer around the time Chrome launched was v7. IE 6 was already old news by then. And IE 8 launched soon after the Chrome launch. 9, 10, and 11 followed. And then the switch to Edge happened; which was a complete rewrite of their browser engine. Only in 2020, MS announced switching to Chromium. So, that's about 12 years of MS trying to hold on before they finally gave up.

How will an alternative browser get people to use it when major sites all make it impossible to use a non-Chromium browser?

Yes, that line is important.

This has happened before. Remember the critique against Encrypted Media Extensions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions): Oh no, DRM in the browser! But remember that web video used to require Adobe Flash for the longest time, and even after a decade of HTML5 video, sites were still clinging onto Adobe Flash (and later also Microsoft Silverlight) for what turned out to be DRM purposes. At the time, these plagued proprietary blobs were not going anywhere. Except, after EME had widely supplanted this last holdout usecase, they were quietly allowed to die. The result is that we have much smaller-scoped proprietary blobs in the form of content delivery modules with a lot fewer bugs and portability issues.

The situation with Flash and Silverlight was better than the situation currently is with EME. Before, you could implement a standard-compliant open source web browser, you just may not be able to view certain non-web embeds. Now, web browsers need permission from Google to view certain kinds of web content, and they can't be open source.

I agree with the other commenter.

The current situation is worse.

EME requires that the browser ship with a DRM library like Widevine.

Flash used an industry standard plugin model and could work in any browser.

This move does not stop the arms race. Non-anonymous data is still better for the ad industry. Why give that up?

Because browsers can clamp down on The non-anon data streams when there’s a working alternative.

Wait aren't browsers already trying to implement anti-tracking measures? Are you saying Mozilla has been holding back improving anti-tracking for the benefit of advertisers until now? Now that is evil

> Wait aren't browsers already trying to implement anti-tracking measures?

Yes, and trackers are investing large sums of money into breaking those measures.

If you give advertisers a lawful non-user-threatening way to measure their ads performance, a lot of that money may disappear.

(Or it may not, or it may disappear either way. That one market is crazy and I know almost nothing about it. But the claim that the money may disappear is valid, and you have to provide a valid counter-claim if you want to contest it. Calling it evil doesn't cut it.)

But this is exactly what I wrote that I don't believe in my initial comment. There'll always be more money in more intrusive tracking. Why would they give that up? Surely Mozilla is selling out to advertisers based on something more substantive than "we hope that advertisers won't keep taking a mile if we give an inch"?

And that DRM will likely come anyway and restric users of niche browsers like Firefox and operatings systems no matter what Mozilla does - just look how EME implementations and Websites using it treat Linux users not to mention non-x86/ARM architectures. So best is to push back now while we still can instead of giving them an inch.