That is a complete misrepresentation of the situation. This is almost literally a case of "choose your poison" for Mozilla. Abstaining is no way to win. There is no way to win this for Mozilla, damned if they do, damned if they don't.

However, at least with Mozilla you get the benefit that the DRM piece is as contained as possible and you are not leaking information to the content providers. Something Mozilla fought for that neither Google nor Microsoft gave anything about.

Also, Mozilla doesn't brag about its mission. What does that even mean? That Mozilla is pointing out the difference between itself and the other players in the market? It's vital that people are aware of the fact that Mozilla is a mission driven organization. That is the reason d'etre of Firefox.

> Also, Mozilla doesn't brag about its mission.

Really? Maybe that's just my perception, but I'd say their homepage is almost all about their mission and principles (and then about their products that are said to be driven by those). And their "about" page is the same. If that's not bragging - I'm not sure what bragging really is.

Then, their manifesto is very anti-DRM by nature, all promoting openness and end-user accessibility and control. So, it seems that they had already chosen their position and part of it was to abstain from the consumer restrictions.

Now, when their targets (bringing their products to everyone and promoting openness) started to seriously conflict with each other, it was clearly shown that the dark side is more seductive.

My old firefox tshirt says "Take back the web" across the back in big letters. Now that they have "given the web back", Im not sure I can wear it anymore.

Definition of brag [1]: 1. a pompous or boastful statement 2. arrogant talk or manner: cockiness

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brag

No it's a perfect analogy.

Mozilla have added an attack vector on users. They fought for the right to be the people adding the poison. That's not noble or unfortunate.

It means that there is no difference between Mozilla and the other "players in the market". Except that Mozilla are lying to themselves about it.

And where does most of Mozilla's funding come from? Google. As long as that's the case it can never be truly independent.

I wish they found an alternate source of cash that allowed them to get rid of those Google hypocrites.

Disclaimer: I work for the arrogant Google hypocrites.

I don't think Google has anything to do with it. Any realistic source of funding for Mozilla is going to be proportional to market share.

Unfortunately, the principled path is not tenable for Mozilla in this position. They were seriously damaged by their refusal to implement H.264 due to its patented nature, which they gave up recently. Mozilla has the choice of taking their lumps by swallowing this piece of crap and continuing to survive or becoming obsolete. If users can watch videos without a struggle in Chrome but can't watch in Firefox, what's the effect going to be? Firefox is already on the ropes, they can't handle another H.264 debacle.

You stand by your principle or you don't have one.

"We 98% stand by our principles but at the end of the day, if it is important enough, we will cave like we did before"

Is not an inspiring message.

Mozilla should stop the whole "We are Mozilla Doing good is part of our code", "Different by design" shtick because it is no longer true, they are now just another software house that makes a browser.