There are so many people here claiming this is the wrong choice, and yet I wonder what percentage of the commenters here are using chrome? By most sources I've seen, Chrome has 2x the marketshare, and actively pushed FOR EME. Perhaps if FF had Chrome's current marketshare, they would have been in a position to say no, but its the users who made that impossible. Mozilla should be commended for fighting as far as they did. And if you don't like this decision, make sure you switch off chrome before commenting.
Thank you. Watching people on this site verbally fellate Chrome and Safari on the basis of incredibly trivial things like look and feel and "minimal UI", while ignoring the incredibly important things like the company building the products and it's positions is frustrating, even more so now that they are all crawling out of the woodwork crying alligator tears.
The tech community brought this upon itself when it switched over to browsers provided by two enormous corporations fully beholden to their shareholders, instead of sticking with a browser developed by goddamn public benefit corporation.
The tech community brought this on itself when it couldn't be bothered to test sites in anything other than Chrome and maybe Safari on their iphone.
The tech community brought this on itself when it started making websites webkit only, without a thought for what vendor prefixing would do to web compatibility.
The tech community brought this on itself when it decided that per-process tabs were more important than preventing the future of the web from being controlled by 3 enormous corporations.
So I say that we stop complaining and start getting used to it. This is what we all wanted, and now we can reap what we have sown, while the gentle glow of the chrome url box lights up our screen.
Mozilla brought this on itself when they took the epic lead they had with Firebug and utterly squandered it by thinking real dev tools were not something a browser should include out of the box, in favour of an utterly useless "3D" DOM view that is a made up diagram conveying no useful information about compositing or layering.
Mozilla brought this on itself when they treated memory leaks and extension crashes as performance issues to be papered over rather than fundamental flaws in an architecture unprepared for how people wanted to use it.
Mozilla brought this on itself when they treated OS X like the idiot stepchild instead of delivering the native experience users clearly loved in Chrome and Safari, thus alienating the Mac-dominated cutting edge of web tech.
Mozilla brought this on itself when they provided incomplete implementations of CSS transforms, Web Audio and WebGL (an idea they originated!), and a bunch of other specs people actually wanted. Parts of WebGL are broken in the current stable release of Firefox, and yet Mozilla wants to go around claiming the high ground with Unreal and asm.js?
If they'd spend less money on having their 'evangelists' show off trivial toys around the world, and more on actually solving real daily problems (like the Chrome developer tools team did), we wouldn't be in this mess, and they wouldn't think moves of desperation like asm.js are a good idea.
Are those problems so bad, that even you stooped as low as using a proprietary browser? Was that a sufficient price for your freedom?
Mozilla made mistakes, but it doesn't excuse the blindness of its users. Reminds me of GNU/Linux vs OSX. Apple made a shiny new OS that "just works" on their own hardware, and a good chunk of the tech community went drooling over this, instead of getting its act together and fixing the Linux desktop. Again, I guess this is the price of freedom.
Are you for real? Mozilla gets $300 million per year from Google to maintain the pretense of freedom. Meanwhile I have to pay my own bills and deliver projects that my clients will pay for. To bring money into this argument and somehow blame "the users" for this string of epic mess ups is fucking rich.
Was I supposed to not diagnose jank using Chrome's frame analysis tools? Not profile memory allocations in its timeline? Develop my WebGL against an incomplete, broken and slow implementation to spare Mozilla's feelings? Firefox is a buggy and slow hunk of code whose maintainers are high on their own supply, and are only now starting to eat the humble pie now it's far too late. Simple as that.
Oh and the reasons why people switched to OS X are more related to connecting to wifi in under 1 second and implementing sleep/hibernate in a way that makes sense. Elegant solutions to real problems, not hack piled upon hack. Not that the hardcore free software nerds will ever get any of that, because it's too nice and shiny for them to even consider.
First thought: wow, you have a hostile attitude, contrary to the site guidelines.
Second thought: if you're happy using Apple products because the WiFi works better and you don't care about freedom, then where's your stake in this thread? AFAICT, you don't care (much) about DRM, so ep103's exhortation for people to be consistent is not criticizing you. You, AFAICT, are ethically consistent; you suckle the teat of convenience, and you like how it tastes. Power to you! So what's your problem?
Unless you DO care about DRM.
Again, ep103's point is: if Alice complains about Mozilla's philosphical weakness, but Alice is already using a browser (and/or OS!) that is twice as bad as Mozilla, then Alice is a hypocrite and should look in the mirror, because she's part of the problem.
Go open a theatre, you're great at projecting. The problem is exactly that I'm supposed to love Linux and Mozilla, because these are the approved choices of the Free Software World. As a result, both suck, and none of the people involved want to hear it, because how could you not love freedom and puppies and doing good?
I've seen up close and personal how Mozilla spends its oodles of cash, I've spoken to folks from all the browser vendors at conferences. The only thing different about Mozilla is the sanctimonious attitude and the utter shock when you dare suggest their actions do not necessarily match words. Everyone else already knows how the game is being played.
Do I need a source? AFAIK main Encrypted Media Extension advocates were Netflix and Google. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/lowering-your-standard... and such. Google has a dominant user share of browsers, so just by supporting DRM Google already creates pressure on all browser developers to support DRM as well. But aside from that, Google is also a major (90%) funding source of Mozilla/Firefox.
>Perhaps if FF had Chrome's current marketshare, they would have been in a position to say no
It still would have accomplished nothing, because websites would just have a "this site doesn't work in Firefox, try switching to Chrome or IE or Safari" block page. And no amount of Firefox marketshare could make them not have that block page, because if they let Firefox access the content DRM-free the sites would lose their licenses on the content.
