The amount of work it would take to fork Chromium and maintain a working secure browser with MV2 hooks into the browser internals would be so large that you'd need a dedicated team whose job it is to constantly backport upstream Chromium changes and ensure they still work with the old MV2 subsystem. That would take a lot of time and money.
Well you don't need to implement every stupid thing big G thinks should be in it, just the really critical stuff. Even if you freeze all features right now you'll probably still have a better renderer than gecko for 5 years into the future.
I mean right now I bet a lot of people will simply not update to MV3 and continue using the last known MV2 build into perpetuity until certs break or something else. I sure intend to.
Backporting from an entity that is hostile towards MV2 makes me suspect that Google isn't going to play ball and make maintaining an MV2-compatible Chromium fork easy.
No, especially not if you want to watch videos, the DRM plugin is a binary blob that only Google approved browsers get to run.
Then there are all the Google services that will break in unexpected ways in your browser, sometimes just because your user agent isn't identical to Chromes if past reports from Firefox users are any indication. Basically expect to be shit on by the biggest internet giant around at ever possible corner.
Depends on the browser and platform. WideVine support on Firefox for Linux is limited, one of the biggest effects of this is that some video platforms refuse to serve up high definition video to Firefox users on Linux. Netflix, for example, will only allow you to watch video at 720p on Firefox for Linux. The existing WideVine support comes directly from Google.
Open Addons an Themes, click on Plugins, by default you should see a line that says "Widevine Content Decryption Module provided by Google Inc." . Note the Google Inc. .
Fair, and I didn't know that or had forgotten it, but I think Firefox is still relevant to the parent's comment, and the context of the topic:
> No, especially not if you want to watch videos, the DRM plugin is a binary blob that only Google approved browsers get to run.
So it might be better to say that you don't need to be locked into Google's browser (or a fork of its OS base) in order to consume a wide variety of online content, and you can thus avoid this issue with Chrome extensions entirely. And at least with Firefox it is just a plugin, so presumably could be replaced with a binary blob from someone else if Google's influence became worrisome enough (and I do wonder, isn't it already worrisome enough??).
It could be controlled by a third party that isn't trying to dominate the browser market. And Google already caused issues years ago when it side loaded that plugin on open source distros and initially refused to provide an option to disable this behavior in chromium.
Secure DRM requires that your device have keys that are burned-in that you can't access. It's impossible to have an open implementation of a non-broken DRM system.
Spite is at times my main source of motivation, and still leaves me physically uncapable of following the rate of breakage of upstream Firefox (i.e. I cant keep my patches up to date), which I'm assuming it's actually a more sensible upstream when compared with Google.