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1. Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Jul-2023 11:05:54 JST Aral Balkan

   in reply to

   • Charles U. Farley

   @freakazoid Google pays Mozilla roughly half a billion dollars every year. Google is the reason Mozilla exists. If Google stopped paying Mozilla, Mozilla would go bankrupt.

   • Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Jul-2023 11:05:55 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     And believe me, the odds of Firefox not supporting this are basically zero. Mozilla is how Google pretends Chrome has competition, and if suddenly Firefox can't render a significant fraction of web sites, it gets a lot harder to continue pretending. I wouldn't be surprised if Google pays them to implement it, like they pay them to make Google the default browser today.

   • Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Jul-2023 11:05:56 JST Charles U. Farley

     in reply to

     I read somewhere that it's not an "official" Google proposal because it's on an employee's Github page, but isn't that the way Google has always manipulated web standards? As far as I know that's just how the W3C works, with proposals coming from individuals rather than corporations.

     I don't expect Mozilla to be any help here. Firefox doesn't even provide a way to turn off the banner that appears on the top of your screen prompting you to enable DRM on pages that include DRM content. I had to add a snippet to user.js to get rid of it.

   • Charles U. Farley (freakazoid@retro.social)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Jul-2023 11:05:57 JST Charles U. Farley

     I'm really not sure how to feel about WEI. On the one hand, it's DRM, and all DRM is bad. On the other, maybe it will finally present an opportunity to stop pretending YouTube is a viable way to share videos.

     But there is another way it could go: if anyone can come up with "good enough" and "lightweight enough" DRM that most people will just allow it and get on with their lives, it would be Google. And it could become REALLY INCONVENIENT to avoid it. Computing freedom could be about to take a huge step backward, like it did with the jump to mobile, which was pretty much a death blow.

     It doesn't matter if you have a general purpose computer on your lap if a huge fraction of what you do runs in a tamper-proof, surveillance-ridden VM controlled by someone else.

     Sure, we can continue to do things outside of it, just like we don't have to use Android or iOS to do anything. But how many people reading this don't carry an Android or iOS device everywhere with them, or even use an open source Android distro? The web landscape is horrible enough already, with even Microsoft not able to maintain a viable browser (and after watching Liz's tribulations with Safari I'd say Apple can't either). And now Google wants to make fully open source browser implementations completely impossible. And I suspect they will be successful, because people just don't care.