Google Chrome Arrives on ARM64 Linux, Widevine DRM Included(omgubuntu.co.uk) |
Google Chrome Arrives on ARM64 Linux, Widevine DRM Included(omgubuntu.co.uk) |
The alternative is that Netflix et. al can't be played on firefox and you need to install chrome just to watch it, which weakens firefox's market share even more.
I think this is because simply chasing Chrome didn't have the desired effect anyway. By doing so, Mozilla hurt Firefox by gradually reducing what differentiated it from Chrome in the first place, relegating it to be kind of just a worse Chrome that looks even weirder.
A similar statement would be something like, "Firefox may as well pledge to support Web Environment Integrity; otherwise, people will just use Chrome."
In a totally different vertical, Valve has made interesting choices. To my knowledge, they do not provide a way to do attestation on Steam hardware devices, so games that want to support Steam hardware simply have to get rid of their intrusive DRM and anti-cheat, or at least significantly loosen it. Depending on how you look at it, this has either been a massive success or a massive failure. After all, a lot of big games don't run; Fortnite, Valorant, etc. But on the other hand, it remains a very powerful incentive for publishers and developers to reconsider their choices, as these devices still do have a non-trivial marketshare. (And for smaller games this obviously is hard to ignore, probably often moreso than intrusive DRM.)
Mozilla may have been ultimately correct that the choices they made helped them stay relevant; it's hard to know for sure how much their marketshare would be different today if they made bolder choices, but in the long run I think it has doomed them, as it is now unclear what even really differentiates Firefox. The last remaining thing seems to just be that you can run the full version of uBlock Origin, which is pretty valuable and all, but I'm not sure it makes up for the deficiencies. (I also like Container Tabs, but I think that feature is pretty niche, possibly somewhat by virtue of the fact that Firefox is now pretty niche.)
I'm currently using Librewolf. My long term hope was that Ladybird would become the browser that does what Firefox should have, but when I asked Andreas Kling whether or not Ladybird would try to support EME/Widevine in an HN thread, there was no reply, which is pretty close to "probably".
I really don't know how much good that does to Netflix. If you take a popular show from Netflix and google "show name free online" you will find ton of sites streaming it the second day it was streamed on Netflix. HD quality nonetheless.
Except all the DRMs are broken judging by all the items labeled "WEB-DL" online, which appears to be a download of the original unencrypted stream.
So, really, the DRM does nothing except piss off legitimate consumers.
But that's Netflix's decision to enforce, not a foregone technical requirement. Not to mention that widevine has been cracked as far as I understand it and doesn't stop people from pirating it.
why pay for something you cant use
"Oh but firefox share is diminishing" yes, but it still exists. Or could be another browser
Gee I wonder why that didn't work out.
Thinking back at the actual history (and I lived it, having used Netscape Navigator, the Mozilla Suite and Phoenix 0.1), my view is that when Firefox was winning marketshare in Windows-land over IE, the release of Chrome and Google behind it basically killed (slowly) its momentum [1]. Even if the momentum was surely paid for by Google who was the default search engine in Firefox and paid millions to Mozilla for it.
So, to answer your question: Google is the reason it didn't work out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
That logic might work for firefox's product direction as a whole, but narrowly looking at the EME issue, what should have they done? If they didn't implement EME, then people will have to install chrome to watch netfilx. The users who are there as a matter of principle (eg. HN readers) might still use firefox as their daily driver, but they'd almost certainly lose some normies who were using firefox on inertia. Meanwhile because they refused to negotiate, they won't be able to influence the direction of the standard, which means no sandboxing of DRM modules and other privacy features. Both firefox and their users lose out in this scenario.
Firefox is a bad way to use Netflix anyways. It doesn't support high resolutions because it has limited Widevine support anyways. It doesn't support Widevine l1 and never has. So... It is a worse way to watch Netflix.
I'm sorry but this "we can't possibly take a risk like this" mentality is cancerous. It is comfortable to "play it safe" and all, but nobody takes any risks for anything anymore. It's not calculated when the calculation is "avoid risk at all costs".
Lose the users lose the funding. Firefox can't live out of HN as its sole userbase. Have you checked how much it costs to build and maintain a modern browser?
Plenty of users who have no money for TV or consoles, watch it on their laptop on low quality. I am one of those who watches Netflix on Linux Firefox :)
This isn't just any risk. It's an existential one for Firefox. You are asking them to make something that would be unpopular to the majority of its userbase at a point when they are borderline extinct. You are asking Mozilla to jeopardise Firefox for the same of a feature that YOU dislike enough to want to burn Firefox to the ground to get rid of it.
Or, reintroduce browser plugins (with permission based architecture).
Firefox supports Widevine Level 1 on Windows 11 devices with the requisite hardware and has for a year or so.
Not many providers other than Netflix support it still, but it does.
any examples? i only use firefox, including for work, as well as encourage all of my students to use it, and i cant think of any sites that dont work.
if anything, i would say its sort of the opposite (getting easier to use). some microsoft websites were wonky ~5 years ago, but now all seem to work perfectly in firefox.
I've heard this said for the past ten years or so and so far haven't found it to be true.
Multiple independent implementations are the only practical way to ensure a self-consistent and reasonable platform. Sure, it's not a disaster in an area where people can recompile all their code when something in the platform (eg the compiler) changes, but that's now how the web works.
There's really nothing to suggest this has been the case.
I very much expect Valve to implement a hardware backed attestation and signed driver model for future hardware.
Yes there is, like for example, EAC and BattlEye implementing Linux support (without attestation) for the first time. It is true that not all games enable it, but idk, you're implying there is no reason to believe it, which is not true.
> I very much expect Valve to implement a hardware backed attestation and signed driver model for future hardware.
There's really nothing to suggest that this will be the case.
To be completely fair, some of it isn't really by choice. Like, the qmk configurator doesn't support Firefox, but that's because it needs APIs Firefox intentionally doesn't have. Should Firefox have these APIs? The WebUSB thing doesn't personally bug me the way Chrome implements it so I'd say sure. I'd certainly prefer having that over EME.
A lot of video-conferencing websites work that way as Firefox has had a lot of issues keeping up with the WebRTC standard evolution that power them for example.
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/IY2am...
https://webrtchacks.com/is-everyone-switching-to-unified-pla...
Then they did it again with MediaStreamTrackProcessor and MediaStreamTrackGenerator.
Then they did it again with Insertable Streams, which is still an issue for interoperable E2EE (Firefox ships a standardized variant).
If you think of websites as running on a standardized platform, then the workarounds are for Chrome, not Firefox. They include, and default to, code that calls unspecified APIs and then the ones that care autodetect when that doesn't work and fall back to APIs with actual agreed-upon specs.
Describing this as "Firefox has had a lot of issues keeping up with the WebRTC standard evolution" is... inaccurate. My impression is that there have been, and continue to be, areas where this could be leveled as a fair complaint. But refusing to implement rejected proposals because they had too much uptake already? That's the only way to keep the web platform's foundation solid.
Had to spend an hour on the phone trying to figure out why my dad couldn't access a government portal. Only supported on Chrome.
Discussing certain things on HN is like a portal into another dimension full of profoundly out-of-touch people who somehow think being contrarian to the technical nerd crowd is actually what being "in touch" means. How do you reckon Firefox actually gained popularity in the first place?
I don't think Firefox ever lived or died on "purity", but it sure as shit harmed its own image multiple times over the years in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with "catering to a loud minority". Like for example:
- Killing all of the extensions; extensions that once differentiated Firefox as a product became unusable or unavailable, like Vertical Tabs and NoScript. The Web Extension versions of these never worked as well. It killed off one thing that made Firefox "better" than Chrome. Did the vocal minority ask for this?
I fully understand that Web Extensions was done for technical reasons, but of all the paths forward it's hard to imagine this was actually the best one. Today, Firefox hardly offers any extensions Chromium-based browsers do not or can not, mainly because Firefox extensions got worse.
- The various over-reaching sponsorship deals. The Google Search one obviously drew plenty of scrutiny itself, but I think most people understood it as a necessity. The Looking Glass/Mr Robot advertisement controversy and its use of Firefox Studies as a vector for deploying unwanted code, on the other hand, absolutely hurt Firefox's image among power users (and some others, judging by press at the time). Hey maybe they should've consulted that vocal minority.
- The "Terms of Use" update. It is still to this day not clear why this was necessary, but it was bad PR that spread throughout the Internet, especially Twitter and Reddit.
- A lot of updates that made user customization worse or more limited, bringing it much more in-line with Chrome. Mobile Firefox doesn't even let you use about:config anymore, and still only allows whitelisted extensions as far as I know.
- The new AI push. Now when you hold down the mouse button on a link you get a "link preview". Nobody asked if you wanted this feature, it's just there now. The previews are almost unilaterally useless, too, just to add insult to injury.
They may very well have lost a lot of their marketshare for other reasons, but because of a lot of these decisions there is little reason for a user to not choose Chrome.
Can they trust Mozilla more? Well, their track record isn't fantastic, all things considered.
Can Firefox do anything Chrome can't? There's a couple things but Chrome does a lot more things that Firefox can't do than vice versa.
Is Firefox faster or more efficient than Chrome? That one was lost a long time ago.
Is Firefox more secure than Chrome? Given that it still lacks a lot of the sandboxing technologies Chrome has, I'd venture to guess "no".
Mozilla's problem isn't that they weren't "pure" enough, but it absolutely is a problem that they seemed to really lack any principles at all and just blindly chase trends and Chrome to try to keep up. This really has nothing to do with purity and is exactly the opposite of caring about a vocal minority. It's just that chasing Chrome was always a losing strategy from the start.
The vocal minority, of course, is the Firefox evangelists. Upsetting and ignoring the people who evangelize your products isn't usually your best move...
> Thinking back at the actual history (and I lived it, having used Netscape Navigator, the Mozilla Suite and Phoenix 0.1), my view is that when Firefox was winning marketshare in Windows-land over IE, the release of Chrome and Google behind it basically killed (slowly) its momentum [1]. Even if the momentum was surely paid for by Google who was the default search engine in Firefox and paid millions to Mozilla for it.
I also lived through the rise of Firefox, FWIW; the first browser I ever used was Netscape Navigator 4.0.
How did Firefox manage to spread against the pre-installed Internet Explorer browser? Aside from that splashy NYT ad, I would assert much of it came from word-of-mouth.
Chrome probably spread a lot just by virtue of being pre-installed on a lot of computers and phones, but that's also how Internet Explorer spread. At some point, people stopped installing Firefox on their new machines, and it's worth interrogating why.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the overwhelming majority of users are going to install the app or use chrome. The average internet user is someone who thinks facebook and tiktok is spying on them but uses those apps anyways. What makes you think they'd take a stand on netfilx, of all things?
>Or, reintroduce browser plugins (with permission based architecture).
That's literally what EME is, with better sandboxing.
As for the other APIs you mention, developers had wanted those shipped then, so developers got them. The risks are evaluated, but in the end, the client is king. If the standardization process is slowed down because of nitpicking and procedural mishap and not able to work with the needs of the users, it's a problem. It took years for them to be standardized while being heavily used by experts everywhere in the first version. Shipping early is also part of the standardization process where it goes to trial and it is evaluated by users, so it's not surprising to have a complex API implemented first to gather feedback. Without such feedback, none of it would have been implemented or standardized the right way. It's implementation experience that is crucial for WebRTC's domain space.
WebRTC is a live API, it's changing all the time, especially with all those expert APIs. It's not unexpected. But years long delays don't serve anyone except for late implementers that then have the newer version done and can complain that someone else is not compliant and their version is "better". No, you're just super late at implementing a live API.
That's why Firefox has been having issues with WebRTC for a long time. Having the ICE server validation WPT passing is great, but that's only an edge error case, it's not what is passed by applications in working shape or what developers need.
I am not familiar with the way Widevine works, but if that is true, there must be a way to hack that support into the Linux version. After all, the code is there and it should be possible to spoof hardware identifiers or whatever is needed to run Widevine on an open platform.
> Firefox does not support Widevine L1 (hardware-based DRM) on any operating system, and is restricted strictly to Widevine L3 (software-based DRM).
Tsk tsk, that one's on me.
But what does "having principles" translate to? Focusing on the EME issue, how many people are going to be like "humpf, firefox added EME so I'm going to use chrome instead!"? Is that small slice of the user base even worth keeping? If they're going to be incensed by random issues like this, they're probably not worth the trouble to cater to, or maybe they'll just flip flop between chrome and firefox (depending on what the latest outrage headline is) that there's not much point in catering to.
If you can't articulate specific benefits to "having principles", then you're not really interested in firefox winning, you just want it to die a martyr.
> If you can't articulate specific benefits to "having principles", then you're not really interested in firefox winning, you just want it to die a martyr.
You've got it backwards. It's not that people use Chrome in retaliation for Firefox having zero principles, it's that people stop caring to install Firefox because there's no clear reason to keep using it.
Having no principles itself eventually loses you a small minority of users... and those were your core supporters and evangelists. It is not a huge number of people, but it's not good when your base of supporters is rotting from the inside-out.
Who's going to switch to chrome (or not install firefox, next time they install a browser), even though that also has DRM, and unlike firefox's EME implementation, can't be disabled and is even more invasive? Either they care about DRM/EME and therefore they'll choose the least bad option, or it's all posturing.
And frankly, they really don't seem to stand for a whole lot. Being a bit better than Google is possibly the lowest bar ever cleared.
Call it posturing, or whatever you want. Sentiment turned on Mozilla and sentiment matters, you can say whatever you want about why. For the record, I do not think implementing EME killed Firefox, I think it is just one poor Chrome-chasing choice among many that sealed its fate.
