I'm not sure that thats quite fair— Firefox won't run the CDM without user consent. You can still say no.

Having a choice doesn't magically resolve the issues, it doesn't prevent content providers from making things formerly available unavailable, it doesn't help us (as users) make better more considered decisions rather than clicking yes a lot to get things done, etc. But it does retain the choice to not run this stuff, choice which is not retained in the current closed source alternatives.

If content providers knew that there was a large chunk of users they'd be excluding by choosing the DRM option, they would be less likely to choose it. Firefox may be only 20% of web users, but that's still a lot of revenue to leave on the table if we can rely on firefox users to stick with firefox. I don't know whether or not we can - apparently, Mozilla is worried about it.

The best option might be to sink this development energy into something that will draw users from other browsers, if they can figure out what...

"Content is king!" Have you never heard that before?

You say Mozilla should figure out what will draw users from other browsers, but you've outlined what will draw users from Mozilla to other browsers. In the end, people want content. The content providers have more control. If 70-80% of the browsers already support the DRM they want to use, the other 20-30% will follow or be left out. Which is exactly what happened here.

There is tons of content on the web that has nothing to do with video. There is tons of video on the web that has nothing to do with DRM. If there is 20% of web surfers excluded by Netflix and Youtube, and DRM in fact doesn't matter for securing sales, then that's a huge edge for any new content provider that wants to compete with the incumbents.

All of that said, yes, of course this is something that will serve as a draw for users away from Mozilla. And yes, of course Mozilla might not be able to find something else that can serve as a better (or even comparable) draw that will not compromise their principles at least as much. I'm not casting aspersions at Mozilla and saying "Gee, they're dumb, why don't they just...". I'm saying "It would be better if they had found X" where I'm not at all sure such an X exists.

How many users would stick around when YouTube or Netflix stop working though?

Oh, I don't know that they made the wrong decision - I have every expectation that they thought about this as well and decided it was too likely they did not have the clout. I said as much.

Wait, since when YouTube is supposed to use DRM? I just downloaded 5 videos with DownloadHelper today.

It probably will be once DRM/EME is available in every browser. At least the chances are increasing, and that's exactly why making DRM ubiquituous and easily accessible is such a bad idea.

The problem is not that Mozilla implementing EME removes leverage to force Netflix into abandoning DRM (this won't happen anyway anytime soon), the problem is that once DRM is readily available without a large technological investment and without losing too many users, virtually everyone will use it for virtually everything, simply because there is little to none incentive not to do it, from a publisher's perspective.

Some, but not all, YouTube videos use DRM. It's up to the person posting the video.

The problem is that no one can guarantee that the "opt-out" choice will continue to be there in the foreseeable future. What will happen when, suddenly Mozilla starts "feeling the pressure" to remove that option? What then? The problem is the building's foundations, not the decoration.

This seems unlikely, and in fact, Firefox has been moving in the opposite direction with other binary components (Flash, Java, Silverlight). Newer builds of Firefox require you to explicitly confirm that you'd like to allow <site> to execute plugin code. I doubt this will change any time soon.

I'd rather have a (albeit stupid) DRM executable that only performs encryption/decryption than Flash, Java, or Silverlight, which are the current solutions for this. All three of these offer APIs for doing things other than decrypting DRM content, and these APIs have been proven time and time again to be vulnerable to attack, no matter how much time is spent trying to sandbox them properly.

It's open source - actually open source. If they make the CDM on by default, you change a bool in the .cpp file and recompile it.

Really, come on. You should understand this. Firefox isn't like Chromium, where the 'blessed' Google version, Chrome, has dozens of important features sitting behind proprietary black boxes - the Firefox you download off Mozilla's website is something you could literally compile yourself. I've compiled Firefox dozens of times, sometimes with in-development patches for things like gamepad support added in.

Your fear is pure paranoia.

The proposal has an inherent opt-out choice. Content providers provide media within DRM containers, users can choose if they get the media or not.

It's not like anybody can force you to watch the last Hollywood stuff.

In other implementations you can't tell if its using the DRM or not.

In the land of PDF you can find things like random federal agencies slapping the protection bits on complete inexplicable things, even though the content is public domain by law. ... just because the knob is there.

The 'you can not use it' opt-out ignores the cost of actually discovering that you should. The Mozilla proposal is better than that because it will tell you. This still doesn't solve all the issues, but its better than you'll find in other popular browsers.

Who would be pressuring Mozilla to remove the option?

Who pressured Mozilla to remove the option to turn off Javascript? To have tabs on bottom? Nobody complained about these options, they decided to remove them themselves.

The users. If all browsers implement DRM, what reason is there to stay on Firefox?

People don't want DRM, people want content. That content is demanding DRM (via Youtube, Netflix). If Mozilla denied the DRM, Firefox users would be denied Youtube.

In response to this, some of you might say 'well then people would go elsewhere for their content', to which I would ask: did people leave Netflix because of Silverlight?

>did people leave Netflix because of Silverlight?

They did, actually. If not by their own doing then by the fact that Netflix is just not available on certain devices and operating systems. As long as Netflix is a DRM platform, this trend will likely continue.

The irony here is that Mozilla is apparently being badgered into supporting DRM for "compatibility reasons" when the whole point of DRM is to strictly limit compatibility with whatever arbitrary restrictions the publisher wants.

That isn't the case. You can choose to not install the CDM component.

Apple has for political reasons disabled the possibility to install a Flash plugin on Safari/iOS. Why doesn't Firefox do the same with a CDM component for political reasons?

Mozila will never have the marketing firepower to pull off such a boycott.

Apple disabled Flash for "security reasons." You can certainly read in politics, but the reason they gave was that it was the #1 attack vector on Macs and they had no way of securing it. And more importantly, nearly everybody else was on Apple's side in this fight. Other browser makers had problems with Flash too. Mac users largely hated Flash because it had terrible performance on that platform. Even Adobe was cooling off toward Flash as it became more and more clear that it wouldn't work on mobile platforms.

Mozilla's position here is not at all similar to Apple's position then, so their options are not the same.

The cost to the user of switching off Apple hardware is much greater than the cost of switching from Firefox to Chrome.

A few years ago there was a cost involved for switching to the iPhone. The only reason why you see this the other way round is that "no Flash" is now established (at least for mobile). On the other hand: no DRM in browser cannot be considered as established - so we are at the same point where the iPhone was some years ago.

Apple also did this for performance and usability reasons. And when Apple did it, there were no smartphone alternatives that provided a sufficiently good Flash experience.

And before you say Android had Flash, I had an Android device that could run Flash in 2011. It was a pretty useless feature.

Saying that Apple "disabled the possibility to install a Flash plugin" implies that that possibility existed at some point. Support for installable browser plugins has never existed on iOS, so there was never anything for Apple to "disable".

Adobe offered Apple an iOS port of Flash and Apple had Access to beta versions of ports. Thus Apple could have enabled the option to install it by default or as option. But for political reasons Steve Jobs/Apple decided differently.

Is there a way to disable all related code in Firefox itself? Just for the sake of it. May be Mozilla can produce clean and tainted builds for that purpose.

The code is 100% open source, so even if there isn't a GUI option for it, it would be easy for people to make builds without it. There are already many forked builds of firefox like iceweasel, etc.

Yes, I expect such thing to surface, but it would be nice if Mozilla could provide such options on their own too. That would be some small positive gesture towards those who don't appreciate their move and see it as a betrayal of Mozilla's core values. It would as well make this issue more apparent. Doesn't Mozilla care about educating the public on such matters? It surely would be a positive thing for the Open Web.

As the blog post mentioned, the EME stuff will be an option that the Firefox user would need to agree to install. That would be an opportunity to educate users on the topic, I think.

I meant it a bit further. Not just disabling the EME external module, but disabling all related code in Firefox itself on the build stage. While functionally it won't make much difference, it would have more of a symbolic nature of making a point. Plus such builds would guarantee that it can't even be enabled at all (without user's knowledge for example).

If there would be build switches to disable that, I'm sure Linux distros with similar to Debian policies will ship versions where it will be disabled altogether.

no. drm will still be an add-on, just like it is today. The DRM add-on will just change from flash/silverlight.

DRM is a very real thing in todays web.

> no. drm will still be an add-on, just like it is today.

Flash is not an add-on, but a plugin. And there is a good reason why plugins have a bad image and browser developers and users prefer to get rid of them.

Watch Netflix, the champion of "HTML5 DRM", go back to a plugin in order to use P2P streaming within the next 18 months.

P2P streaming can be built on top of WebRTC fairly easily.

Nonsense. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/