Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla's Original Sin
Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.
Why having DRM behind a "do you want to install DRM to play media" button is seen as a bad thing? Otherwise everyone would have to use chromium.
No one can tell you here beyond "DRM bad". Which it is, and I hate it, but you're exactly right. All it would do if Firefox refused to implement would drive most users to chrome because there DRM works.
We are not the majority. The majority (and by that I mean roughly 96% of users) want their browser just to work. Taking a moral stand doesn't resonate with them, they just see a broken browser and move on.
Best option though. Chromium browsers are all subject to google's wrath, and there are plenty of Firefox forks to go around. If you don't like vanilla Firefox, try Abrowser, available on Trisquel GNU/Linux, a fully libre GNU/Linux Distribution as well as from the Arch GNU/Linux User Repository.
I’m not a security expert, but I think it’s roughly on-par with LibreWolf. I think they both come without Encrypted Media Extensions.
https://mullvad.net/en/browser/hard-facts
And here's a listing of the compile options:
[…]
- --disable-eme (Encrypted Media Extensions, for other DRMs)
The Mullvad Browser is the Tor Browser without Tor, that is, it's a Firefox-based browser with lots of privacy and anonymity improvements, but without the Tor network layer. Mullvad actually sponsored the Tor project in return for some help getting it done, or something along those lines.
As far as I understand (I'm not super familiar with LibreWolf), Mullvad fork should be "better" in that regard.
Do Firefox forks support the same Firefox addon ecosystem, or do they have smaller selections/manual steps?
I couldn’t say as I can’t speak to every fork in existence, but I think most of them support all Firefox extensions. AFAIK LibreWolf does.
I'm gonna keep using and recommending LibreWolf for the foreseeable future.
But I wonder what other alternative web engines do we have with both Chromium and Gecko being run by advertisers now?
I know Palemoon runs a fork of a really old version of a Gecko and I used it for a bit back when Firefox 58 broke most add-ons. But I'm a bit iffy of it's security these days.
