> I'd have thought the FSF would be more concerned about them potentially switching to Chrome in that use case...

How is Chrome(/Chromium) worse than Firefox, if the latter starts encouraging DRM?

If the FSF should compromise their principles for this, should they have also encouraged everyone to use KDE back when Qt was proprietary?

How about admitting that GIF, despite being patent-encumbered, was OK to use because there it was on so many Geocities sites?

Shoud we all give in and sign patent licenses, so that we can access all of those Bzip1 files?

Maybe we should stop improving our Javascript engines, since clearly Flash won the battle for Web multimedia.

Heck, we could increase the average level of user Freedom if we stopped all of this distracting GNU/Linux/BSD busy-work and concentrated all development effort on developing our Windows and Mac builds.

Clearly no. The FSF have been playing this game for 30 years; they're in it for the long haul.

>How is Chrome(/Chromium) worse than Firefox, if the latter starts encouraging DRM?

Because chrome will too for exactly the same reason Firefox has, but chrome comes with the bonus of tracking the user's activity, creating profiles, and sending pseudonymised data back to google, which with google's analytics and profiles, is as good as personally identifiable to them as they can just link it to maps, gmail, youtube, etc to get a full profile.

Then the users need to be educated about those things too.

Don't you think it's a bit odd that the premise is to "trick" users into using Firefox by luring them in with promises of Netflix support? What's the point of this, and what precedent does it set? These are the issues we need to think about, rather than just saying things like "oh no Mozilla is losing all it's users" and other silly doomsday predictions.

>Then the users need to be educated about those things too.

If you have some magic trick for doing it, go ahead.

A majority of people are stupid. They don't care about their privacy, they use chrome because google advertise it, they leak data everywhere they go, and either don't care, or are imbecilic enough to believe "If you've got nothing to hide, it doesn't matter".

In a way, HN acts as a reality distortion field if you get the bulk of your news from here, because people here are likely to make well researched comments with thought behind them; which makes it easy to forget that a lot of the world's population is very stupid and/or apathetic about most issues.

Aunt Tilly won't be switching to Chrome. She will continue to use Internet Explorer 6 with the Yahoo! and Ask toolbars, but russian bride popup all while partying like it's 1999.

True enough, unless a family member installed Firefox with an IE theme for them and changed the icon, which I have seen happen before. Either way, a user without a clue will switch without understanding the underlying issues.

Joe and Tilly should stop subscribing to Netflix. That would be the correct solution.

Should vs. will is just about what this entire discussion boils down to.

Why does Mozilla care if Joe and Tilly use Chrome? If they don't care about or fund free software, no one benefits from them using Firefox. The user base that cares is the one that matters.

No, all the users matter. The number of people using Firefox gives Mozilla leverage that e.g. GNU Icecat doesn't have.

So, give in to the capitalist bullies who want to make the web theirs as a wholly commercial outlet, starting with the browser, because "they're going to win"?

> If Joe Sixpack or Aunt Tilly uses firefox, wants to watch Netflix, and can't because of this, they're going to switch to Chrome.

They won't switch because they are already using Chrome.

Most Firefox users I know (perhaps I'm biased?) do so not because it's the best browser (it is absolutely not!) but because of Mozilla Foundation's values.

You don't know anyone that uses Firefox for its wider selection of extensions, more customizable UI, and better privacy (separate search bar and URL bar) features?

> wider selection of extensions, more customizable UI

Nope. Most people don't care about that or in fact prefer Chrome's non-customizable UI.

> and better privacy (separate search bar and URL bar, keystrokes not sent to Google as "partial searches" by default)?

That's what I meant with "Mozilla Foundation's values".

Usually when "supporting a company's values" is given as the primary explanation for choosing one product over another it implies that the customer does not gain or is in fact sacrificing some direct benefit because of a factor that not related to the utility of a product relative to its competition.

Increased privacy is very much a direct benefit for a user and it is a real factor that contributes to the utility of FF.

Which adding DRM detracts from.

You're reading too much between the lines.

That's weird. I know a fairly even proportion of users of each, but people who are power users or close are overall more clustered around firefox, to be fair.

That's mostly the case for me too, but not exclusively. As it is, I'd guess Firefox is maybe at most 10-20% power users who are likely to understand privacy issues etc.

You are biased.

How about people switching away from Firefox due to DRM? Don't they care about loosing users that way?

Although TBH there aren't many alternatives (open source, doesn't support DRM), other than a fork of Firefox itself without the DRM bits.

Are you aware that by default Firefox will not be able to display any DRMed content, and that people will be given the choice to download a plug-in to do that just as they are given the choice to install the Flash plugin today? Can't those users just decide not to download the closed source plugin to view the DRMed content? What's the point of switching browsers?

AFAIK the plugin interface for Flash is something generic, its not made for Flash only. This DRM plugin will have open-source code written specially to support DRM plugins, and thus Firefox/Mozilla has given up, and actually endorses the W3C EME, and endorses DRM. That is bad. I'd rather use a browser that doesn't endorse that.

I think the EFF put it right https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/mozilla-and-drm "Baker may think that Mozilla cannot change the industry on its own (despite it having done so many years ago). Sadly, it changes the industry by accepting DRM."

Adding that capability removes any reason for web sites to use any of Firefox's other capabilities.

Mozilla just told all its users to install IE, Chrome or Safari.

I have no idea what other capabilities you are talking about. This is about DRM. What Firefox features would web sites use instead of DRM?

To your second point: If you install IE or Chrome the DRM system will be part of your browser and you have something out of your control running on your system whether you want to watch DRMed content or not.

With Firefox you can just keep using the web, and as long as you never want to watch any DRMed content, nothing changes for you. Only if you want to watch DRMed content will you be asked to download a plugin. As the cherry on top, Firefox will not leak identfiable data about your video usage to DRM or content providers.

Unfortunately Mozilla alone can't stand against the power of Google, Apple, Mircrosoft, Amazon, Netflix and others united in their desire to push DRM through, but if you can't see the difference between Mozilla and the others, I don't think there is anything I can say to change your mind.