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by Wowfunhappy 1781 days ago
Mozilla is basically forced to do whatever Google wants at this point. Firefox doesn't have the marketshare to influence standards, and if it doesn't maintain feature compatibility with Chrome, websites will drop Firefox support, and Firefox will loose even more marketshare and have even less influence.

Mozilla quite clearly didn't want to implement EME, for example, but they couldn't afford for Firefox to not work with Netflix!

Apple has more freedom than Mozilla precisely because Safari users can't just switch to another browser. And for as much as I find that abhorrent and anti-competitive... if Apple is going to retain so much power anyway, I'm at least happy they're using it to prevent Google's total dominance.

3 comments

Pretty sure you wouldn't be happy with Microsoft taking this approach.

It's abhorrent period.

Is it any more or less abhorrent than Google blatant embrace, extend, extinguish approach to the open web?
To be clear, I'm not happy with Apple's approach to iOS. At all.

But Apple doesn't particularly care what I think, so I'm glad they're at least making moves which help preserve the open web, regardless of their motivations.

That rebuttal doesn't make sense. You're claiming that Mozilla is dragged into implementing bad standards by saying EME is a bad standard that they were dragged into, but Apple implemented EME before Mozilla did. The example standards the author gave have nobody arguing against them.
I wasn't making a judgement on whether EME was good or bad†. I was saying Mozilla didn't want to implement it, and was forced to, whereas Apple has more ability to push back against browser features they dislike.

As it so happens, Apple has no issues with DRM; their products are full of it.

† I do think EME is bad, but that's beside the point.

> Mozilla is basically forced to do whatever Google wants at this point.

Doesn’t most of Mozilla’s revenue come from Google?