[azalemeth]

I still think that EME were a mistake for web standards to implement. I disable them by default and yet see widevine requests as part of analytics, the occasional bot captcha, and other inappropriate locations all the time. I really just wish the whole thing would bog off - its anti consumer and approving the standard was I think a really foolish mistake. At least Firefox has an "off" button. Would that it was off by default.

[gruez]

>its anti consumer and approving the standard was I think a really foolish mistake.

The alternative is that Netflix et. al can't be played on firefox and you need to install chrome just to watch it, which weakens firefox's market share even more.

[jchw]

Mozilla making choices specifically to try to "keep up" with Chrome has objectively failed: Firefox's marketshare has plunged so far that it's getting harder to keep using it on the web, as developers simply stop testing or caring much if it works with their site.

I think this is because simply chasing Chrome didn't have the desired effect anyway. By doing so, Mozilla hurt Firefox by gradually reducing what differentiated it from Chrome in the first place, relegating it to be kind of just a worse Chrome that looks even weirder.

A similar statement would be something like, "Firefox may as well pledge to support Web Environment Integrity; otherwise, people will just use Chrome."

In a totally different vertical, Valve has made interesting choices. To my knowledge, they do not provide a way to do attestation on Steam hardware devices, so games that want to support Steam hardware simply have to get rid of their intrusive DRM and anti-cheat, or at least significantly loosen it. Depending on how you look at it, this has either been a massive success or a massive failure. After all, a lot of big games don't run; Fortnite, Valorant, etc. But on the other hand, it remains a very powerful incentive for publishers and developers to reconsider their choices, as these devices still do have a non-trivial marketshare. (And for smaller games this obviously is hard to ignore, probably often moreso than intrusive DRM.)

Mozilla may have been ultimately correct that the choices they made helped them stay relevant; it's hard to know for sure how much their marketshare would be different today if they made bolder choices, but in the long run I think it has doomed them, as it is now unclear what even really differentiates Firefox. The last remaining thing seems to just be that you can run the full version of uBlock Origin, which is pretty valuable and all, but I'm not sure it makes up for the deficiencies. (I also like Container Tabs, but I think that feature is pretty niche, possibly somewhat by virtue of the fact that Firefox is now pretty niche.)

I'm currently using Librewolf. My long term hope was that Ladybird would become the browser that does what Firefox should have, but when I asked Andreas Kling whether or not Ladybird would try to support EME/Widevine in an HN thread, there was no reply, which is pretty close to "probably".

[darkwater]

We already have "no compromises" forks / side-versions of Firefox. FF cannot pull a Steam because they don't have a big enough userbase, and the userbase won't grow if they are too purists, sadly. Firefox lost the battle to Chrome over 10 years ago, partly due to its faults (it was heavy and slower to load that back in the day Chrome) and also because Google shoved Chrome down its users' throat (I perfectly remember the Chrome banner in Google's home page, not even SERP).

[jchw]

They can't pull it now because they don't have big enough marketshare.

Gee I wonder why that didn't work out.

[darkwater]

Surely not because they weren't pure enough. The browser market was always so big that pure alternatives were never with any advantage: on the contrary, they had more issue because they catered to a loud minority that can always push for a "you are not pure enough" narrative. Because who push for that just doesn't care (rightfully) to be mainstream.

Thinking back at the actual history (and I lived it, having used Netscape Navigator, the Mozilla Suite and Phoenix 0.1), my view is that when Firefox was winning marketshare in Windows-land over IE, the release of Chrome and Google behind it basically killed (slowly) its momentum [1]. Even if the momentum was surely paid for by Google who was the default search engine in Firefox and paid millions to Mozilla for it.

So, to answer your question: Google is the reason it didn't work out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

[hulitu]

Firefox shoot itself in the foot before Google take an aim at it. Mozilla decided to change the engine and the UI. Very smart move, indeed.

[jchw]

> they had more issue because they catered to a loud minority that can always push for a "you are not pure enough" narrative. Because who push for that just doesn't care (rightfully) to be mainstream.

Discussing certain things on HN is like a portal into another dimension full of profoundly out-of-touch people who somehow think being contrarian to the technical nerd crowd is actually what being "in touch" means. How do you reckon Firefox actually gained popularity in the first place?

I don't think Firefox ever lived or died on "purity", but it sure as shit harmed its own image multiple times over the years in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with "catering to a loud minority". Like for example:

- Killing all of the extensions; extensions that once differentiated Firefox as a product became unusable or unavailable, like Vertical Tabs and NoScript. The Web Extension versions of these never worked as well. It killed off one thing that made Firefox "better" than Chrome. Did the vocal minority ask for this?

I fully understand that Web Extensions was done for technical reasons, but of all the paths forward it's hard to imagine this was actually the best one. Today, Firefox hardly offers any extensions Chromium-based browsers do not or can not, mainly because Firefox extensions got worse.

- The various over-reaching sponsorship deals. The Google Search one obviously drew plenty of scrutiny itself, but I think most people understood it as a necessity. The Looking Glass/Mr Robot advertisement controversy and its use of Firefox Studies as a vector for deploying unwanted code, on the other hand, absolutely hurt Firefox's image among power users (and some others, judging by press at the time). Hey maybe they should've consulted that vocal minority.

- The "Terms of Use" update. It is still to this day not clear why this was necessary, but it was bad PR that spread throughout the Internet, especially Twitter and Reddit.

- A lot of updates that made user customization worse or more limited, bringing it much more in-line with Chrome. Mobile Firefox doesn't even let you use about:config anymore, and still only allows whitelisted extensions as far as I know.

- The new AI push. Now when you hold down the mouse button on a link you get a "link preview". Nobody asked if you wanted this feature, it's just there now. The previews are almost unilaterally useless, too, just to add insult to injury.

They may very well have lost a lot of their marketshare for other reasons, but because of a lot of these decisions there is little reason for a user to not choose Chrome.

Can they trust Mozilla more? Well, their track record isn't fantastic, all things considered.

Can Firefox do anything Chrome can't? There's a couple things but Chrome does a lot more things that Firefox can't do than vice versa.

Is Firefox faster or more efficient than Chrome? That one was lost a long time ago.

Is Firefox more secure than Chrome? Given that it still lacks a lot of the sandboxing technologies Chrome has, I'd venture to guess "no".

Mozilla's problem isn't that they weren't "pure" enough, but it absolutely is a problem that they seemed to really lack any principles at all and just blindly chase trends and Chrome to try to keep up. This really has nothing to do with purity and is exactly the opposite of caring about a vocal minority. It's just that chasing Chrome was always a losing strategy from the start.

The vocal minority, of course, is the Firefox evangelists. Upsetting and ignoring the people who evangelize your products isn't usually your best move...

> Thinking back at the actual history (and I lived it, having used Netscape Navigator, the Mozilla Suite and Phoenix 0.1), my view is that when Firefox was winning marketshare in Windows-land over IE, the release of Chrome and Google behind it basically killed (slowly) its momentum [1]. Even if the momentum was surely paid for by Google who was the default search engine in Firefox and paid millions to Mozilla for it.

I also lived through the rise of Firefox, FWIW; the first browser I ever used was Netscape Navigator 4.0.

How did Firefox manage to spread against the pre-installed Internet Explorer browser? Aside from that splashy NYT ad, I would assert much of it came from word-of-mouth.

Chrome probably spread a lot just by virtue of being pre-installed on a lot of computers and phones, but that's also how Internet Explorer spread. At some point, people stopped installing Firefox on their new machines, and it's worth interrogating why.

[gruez]

>I think this is because simply chasing Chrome didn't have the desired effect anyway. By doing so, Mozilla hurt Firefox by gradually reducing what differentiated it from Chrome in the first place, relegating it to be kind of just a worse Chrome that looks even weirder.

That logic might work for firefox's product direction as a whole, but narrowly looking at the EME issue, what should have they done? If they didn't implement EME, then people will have to install chrome to watch netfilx. The users who are there as a matter of principle (eg. HN readers) might still use firefox as their daily driver, but they'd almost certainly lose some normies who were using firefox on inertia. Meanwhile because they refused to negotiate, they won't be able to influence the direction of the standard, which means no sandboxing of DRM modules and other privacy features. Both firefox and their users lose out in this scenario.

[jchw]

Simple: allow those users to be lost to preserve the product. The entire Internet is not Netflix. Most Netflix users today don't even use their laptops or desktops for Netflix: they use it on their TVs, phones, video game consoles.

Firefox is a bad way to use Netflix anyways. It doesn't support high resolutions because it has limited Widevine support anyways. It doesn't support Widevine l1 and never has. So... It is a worse way to watch Netflix.

I'm sorry but this "we can't possibly take a risk like this" mentality is cancerous. It is comfortable to "play it safe" and all, but nobody takes any risks for anything anymore. It's not calculated when the calculation is "avoid risk at all costs".

[Mindwipe]

> It doesn't support Widevine l1 and never has.

Firefox supports Widevine Level 1 on Windows 11 devices with the requisite hardware and has for a year or so.

Not many providers other than Netflix support it still, but it does.

[drnick1]

> Firefox supports Widevine Level 1 on Windows 11 devices with the requisite hardware and has for a year or so.

I am not familiar with the way Widevine works, but if that is true, there must be a way to hack that support into the Linux version. After all, the code is there and it should be possible to spoof hardware identifiers or whatever is needed to run Widevine on an open platform.

[jchw]

Sorry for any misinformation; I did try to quickly verify that this was still true, and I made the silly mistake of just assuming the Google AI Overview was good enough confirmation:

> Firefox does not support Widevine L1 (hardware-based DRM) on any operating system, and is restricted strictly to Widevine L3 (software-based DRM).

Tsk tsk, that one's on me.

[netdevphoenix]

> Simple: allow those users to be lost to preserve the product.

Lose the users lose the funding. Firefox can't live out of HN as its sole userbase. Have you checked how much it costs to build and maintain a modern browser?

Plenty of users who have no money for TV or consoles, watch it on their laptop on low quality. I am one of those who watches Netflix on Linux Firefox :)

This isn't just any risk. It's an existential one for Firefox. You are asking them to make something that would be unpopular to the majority of its userbase at a point when they are borderline extinct. You are asking Mozilla to jeopardise Firefox for the same of a feature that YOU dislike enough to want to burn Firefox to the ground to get rid of it.

[jchw]

Yes I am asking them to have principles. I'm sorry this is such an insane concept to understand or appreciate. Maybe the next Mozilla will understand that having principles is not optional.

[thisislife2]

Yes, this is a no brainer. Whenever someone accesses NetFlix on a Firefox with no EME, just display a page which has a short description explaining why Firefox doesn't support EME ("EME is not included to protect your privacy as it allows websites to profile and identify you more easily") and provide a button to open Netflix either through a Netflix app or the pre-installed OS browser (Edge or Safari). Educate your users rather than treating everyone as dumb.

Or, reintroduce browser plugins (with permission based architecture).

[gruez]

>and provide a button to open Netflix either through a Netflix app or the pre-installed OS browser (Edge or Safari). Educate your users rather than treating everyone as dumb.

I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the overwhelming majority of users are going to install the app or use chrome. The average internet user is someone who thinks facebook and tiktok is spying on them but uses those apps anyways. What makes you think they'd take a stand on netfilx, of all things?

>Or, reintroduce browser plugins (with permission based architecture).

That's literally what EME is, with better sandboxing.

[john_strinlai]

>Firefox's marketshare has plunged so far that it's getting harder to keep using it on the web

any examples? i only use firefox, including for work, as well as encourage all of my students to use it, and i cant think of any sites that dont work.

if anything, i would say its sort of the opposite (getting easier to use). some microsoft websites were wonky ~5 years ago, but now all seem to work perfectly in firefox.

[jchw]

I fairly regularly come across websites that are broken even in normal Firefox, like, even on Hacker News. I've had to use Chrome for some local government stuff but I reckon they broke Firefox on accident rather than on purpose and hopefully it is fixed now. Google's own Cloud Console was unusable in Firefox for a couple weeks a few years ago :) This is very different from sites not explicitly supporting Firefox, but it does happen. If I think of/find an explicit example of something broken right now I will link it here.

To be completely fair, some of it isn't really by choice. Like, the qmk configurator doesn't support Firefox, but that's because it needs APIs Firefox intentionally doesn't have. Should Firefox have these APIs? The WebUSB thing doesn't personally bug me the way Chrome implements it so I'd say sure. I'd certainly prefer having that over EME.

[Orphis]

A lot of websites will "work" because they added Firefox workarounds. But to a Chromium or Safari user, it might as well be called a "degraded" mode.

A lot of video-conferencing websites work that way as Firefox has had a lot of issues keeping up with the WebRTC standard evolution that power them for example.

[sfink]

A lot of video-conferencing websites work that way because Chrome shipped a pre-standardization form ("Plan B") of WebRTC, it got a lot of uptake, and then they refused to unship it when the final standard came out with an alternative way of doing the same thing. It took a decade to finally give in and unship the nonstandard path.

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/IY2am...

https://webrtchacks.com/is-everyone-switching-to-unified-pla...

Then they did it again with MediaStreamTrackProcessor and MediaStreamTrackGenerator.

Then they did it again with Insertable Streams, which is still an issue for interoperable E2EE (Firefox ships a standardized variant).

If you think of websites as running on a standardized platform, then the workarounds are for Chrome, not Firefox. They include, and default to, code that calls unspecified APIs and then the ones that care autodetect when that doesn't work and fall back to APIs with actual agreed-upon specs.

Describing this as "Firefox has had a lot of issues keeping up with the WebRTC standard evolution" is... inaccurate. My impression is that there have been, and continue to be, areas where this could be leveled as a fair complaint. But refusing to implement rejected proposals because they had too much uptake already? That's the only way to keep the web platform's foundation solid.

[Orphis]

Plan-B hasn't been relevant in a very long time and Unified Plan has been in a good working shape (and used by Google Meet) for many years. Firefox has lacked many critical APIs from Unified-Plan that developer cared about for a very very long time such as everything related to simulcast and get/setParameters or codec control which are very basic and where implemented in Chromium back in 2018. Firefox didn't have them in 2024 still in working shape. So you can't really blame that long delay on Chrome or on the other APIs it shipped early.

As for the other APIs you mention, developers had wanted those shipped then, so developers got them. The risks are evaluated, but in the end, the client is king. If the standardization process is slowed down because of nitpicking and procedural mishap and not able to work with the needs of the users, it's a problem. It took years for them to be standardized while being heavily used by experts everywhere in the first version. Shipping early is also part of the standardization process where it goes to trial and it is evaluated by users, so it's not surprising to have a complex API implemented first to gather feedback. Without such feedback, none of it would have been implemented or standardized the right way. It's implementation experience that is crucial for WebRTC's domain space.

WebRTC is a live API, it's changing all the time, especially with all those expert APIs. It's not unexpected. But years long delays don't serve anyone except for late implementers that then have the newer version done and can complain that someone else is not compliant and their version is "better". No, you're just super late at implementing a live API.

That's why Firefox has been having issues with WebRTC for a long time. Having the ICE server validation WPT passing is great, but that's only an edge error case, it's not what is passed by applications in working shape or what developers need.

[tekla]

Government websites tend to be an issue.

Had to spend an hour on the phone trying to figure out why my dad couldn't access a government portal. Only supported on Chrome.

[computerfriend]

> it's getting harder to keep using [Firefox] on the web

I've heard this said for the past ten years or so and so far haven't found it to be true.

[Mindwipe]

> But on the other hand, it remains a very powerful incentive for publishers and developers to reconsider their choices, as these devices still do have a non-trivial marketshare.

There's really nothing to suggest this has been the case.

I very much expect Valve to implement a hardware backed attestation and signed driver model for future hardware.

[jchw]

> There's really nothing to suggest this has been the case.

Yes there is, like for example, EAC and BattlEye implementing Linux support (without attestation) for the first time. It is true that not all games enable it, but idk, you're implying there is no reason to believe it, which is not true.

> I very much expect Valve to implement a hardware backed attestation and signed driver model for future hardware.

There's really nothing to suggest that this will be the case.

[xnx]

Firefox should've gone the same route as Internet Explorer and forked Chromium. Firefox could focus its energies on creating features that are different instead of recreating the same ones.

[sfink]

Great, so any minor bug in Chromium's implementation of a spec is going to be forever embedded in the spec as the only allowed way to do it?

Multiple independent implementations are the only practical way to ensure a self-consistent and reasonable platform. Sure, it's not a disaster in an area where people can recompile all their code when something in the platform (eg the compiler) changes, but that's now how the web works.

[ExoticPearTree]

> The alternative is that Netflix et. al can't be played on firefox and you need to install chrome just to watch it, which weakens firefox's market share even more.

I really don't know how much good that does to Netflix. If you take a popular show from Netflix and google "show name free online" you will find ton of sites streaming it the second day it was streamed on Netflix. HD quality nonetheless.

[qingcharles]

All the DRM does is mean that pirates have to record the screen at worst and suffer a slight ding from the double-compression.

Except all the DRMs are broken judging by all the items labeled "WEB-DL" online, which appears to be a download of the original unencrypted stream.

So, really, the DRM does nothing except piss off legitimate consumers.

[Retr0id]

And until today, it would've meant having to boot macOS or Windows to watch Netflix on an aarch64 device, regardless of browser choice. (In practice it has been possible for longer, due to workarounds that were largely only possible due to the standardised EME interface)

[afavour]

I’d argue it’s worse than that, even: Netflix and the rest would make you download a native app.

[raverbashing]

Yeah, obviously

"Oh but firefox share is diminishing" yes, but it still exists. Or could be another browser

[jareklupinski]

> The alternative is that Netflix et. al can't be played on firefox

why pay for something you cant use

[jeroenhd]

You can use it. Just use any other browser. Chrome is free, Brave is free, Vivaldi is free.

[rf15]

> The alternative is that Netflix et. al can't be played

But that's Netflix's decision to enforce, not a foregone technical requirement. Not to mention that widevine has been cracked as far as I understand it and doesn't stop people from pirating it.

[redeeman]

what a terrible loss.