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.
And beyond that, this is also not Mozilla’s decision. A browser-making company is not the one to ask to fix digital media copyright and its enforcement. Talk to you elected personel if you want to fix that, and/or get into politics yourself and fix it.
Bingo
They could just make a download button instead of a toggle. Also it would be nice to be able to disable DRM popups. (I’m looking at you Forbes)
The problem is that toggle gets turned on easily. They could make it the user choice with a option to rip it out completely.