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Free Software Foundation Condemns Mozilla's Move To Support DRM In Firefox
New submitter ptr_88 writes: "The Free Software Foundation has opposed Mozilla's move to support DRM in the Firefox browser, partnering with Adobe to do so. The FSF said, '[We're] deeply disappointed in Mozilla's announcement. The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser market share. It allies Mozilla with a company hostile to the free software movement and to Mozilla's own fundamental ideals. ... We recognize that Mozilla is doing this reluctantly, and we trust these words coming from Mozilla much more than we do when they come from Microsoft or Amazon. At the same time, nearly everyone who implements DRM says they are forced to do it, and this lack of accountability is how the practice sustains itself.'"
Truly, we got an offer we couldn't decline.
Yawn. RMS? Attacking a much more successful group for not living up to his perceived orthodoxy? Gasp.
Thank god this is no longer a common type of article on /., at least.
Mature, Soulskill, really mature.
Firefox adopting DRM is not what is allowing the practice to continue, it is people consuming it. If Firefox did not support DRM directly, the content providers would offer a custom (closed source) tool that did. Until users decide not to view DRM content, the practice will continue, with or without Firefox.
What Firefox is doing is making the hard choice to be flexible and give users the opportunity to view the content or not, they are empowering their userbase to make the choice. Sadly, this means Firefox values user choice more than the FSF. I don't like DRM and I do not plan to view DRMed content, but many people will and if Firefox wants to survive they need to give their users that choice.
I've contacted the CTO at agal@mozilla.com about this on behalf of my company and let him know that Firefox's one core advantage over all the other major browsers has been it's strong stance on freedom. More people need to speak up if there is any hope to effect change though.
If Mozilla gives up its users they've got nothing left to offer. They need to stop following Chrome and Microsoft in a downward spiral. Copying Google & Microsoft's bad ideas and practices is not how you become loved. No, it's these types of bad practices which caused users to abandon those other major browsers in the first place and move to Firefox.
It's time for Mozilla to take charge and lead again. Show its users it's got what it takes to stand up for its users. With the right choices people might actually begin to respect the browser maker again.
Any perceived gain is not worth the moral loss.
Can't we just compile a version without EME? I mean Stallman should have just pointed that at least Firefox is truly free unlike IE, chrome and others whilst reminding us that we can just recompile sans EME. This is yet another case of failure withing the Free community; Destruction without ensuring the core values are witheld.
This involves for-profit corporations giving Mozilla a whole lot of money to continue improving a codebase from which completely free browsers can be easily derived (IceWeasel, IceCat, etc.)
How is this a bad thing?
Time to start using Opera, I guess.
So funny. Just a few short years ago, Mozilla explicitly declined to support H.264 on Windows, even if there was a free native plugin, since it'll partition the Linux users.
And now they're deciding to support DRM, just to keep the market share?
I wonder if anyone technically competent and influential has recently left the company...
They declined in 2009, but the outcry from users meant they changed their stance and are implementing it thanks to Cisco paying the license, and now they're bending again to the will of users.
And the correct abbreviation for Firefox is Fx
Hey now, you can't be suggesting that political purges shouldn't be their top priority, can you comrade?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The dumbest thing about the market share argument is that supporting the DRM blob will decrease Firefox's market share, not increase it. I certainly will not use a browser that supports it, even if I have to write my own fucking GPL3 browser from scratch. Also note that including this binary blob absolutely means that Firefox will no longer qualify as an open source program.
its fork time
Truly, we got an offer we couldn't decline.
Many successful FOSS projects are corporate sponsored or subsidized, so corporations are going to be able to provide direction.
The days of volunteers controlling things are long gone for many large and/or successful projects.
That sums it up precisely.
You can build it without the non-free stuff if you want. It's fine that the FSF is condemning this. It's sorta against everything they stand for, which I get. But I can't get too cheesed off about this since I can always run iceweasel (or was it something else these days...)?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
First, I am against DRM. I think it restricts fair use and innovation, is spyware, and defends obsolete business models.
But what Mozilla did was a good step. Almost every browser in the wild ships with a flash plugin. Flash is worse than any CDM.
I think EME improves current situation, when some websites don't rely on flash anymore.
Most DRM is a rootkit, and not a honest software which balances the content owner's and the users interests. The sandbox approach from Mozilla is very non-intrusive in comparison to other DRM systems, and other EME browsers. I never liked installing any DRM software on my computer, as I give it full access to my system, and I will never be abled to distinguish its behaviour from malware. But when the sandbox really is as restrictive to the blob as it should be, I will probably even use the DRM.
This step of Mozilla will make some content owners accept less intrusive DRM, which is good.
Firefox would suffer a large drop in market share if they refused to support features that a significant portion of their userbase would consider critical. Being known as "that browser that doesn't work with Netflix" isn't the road to success.
If you don't like DRM, that's fine. The average joe doesn't care, and he's going to drop a browser in a heartbeat if it's stopping him from watching House of Cards or whatever other content he wants.
Most people’s reaction to the Mozilla & DRM debacle makes me want to firmly and repeatedly smash my head against my desk. I’ll outline why:
1. People who can’t (be bothered to) read
Most of the criticism comes from people who haven’t been bothered to go and read what Mozilla’s written about the issue (or just suck at it). If these people had, we’d have no complaints of Mozilla forcing users to use DRM, bundling propitiatory code, or ‘giving up’ on user’s freedom and rights.
Essentially all that is happening is Adobe’s CDM is going to be implemented as an optional, monitored, special-type-of-plugin.
I’d say it’s no different from Flash, but it is going to be different. It’s going to be more secure, and presumably less buggy (being a ‘feature’ of Firefox). Once Firefox implements EME, there’s really no reason for Flash or Silverlight to continue to exist. Sure, this setup sucks. But I think Flash sucks more.
As for ‘giving up’: Mozilla can only be influential if it has influence. The primary source of Mozilla’s influence is the number of people using Firefox, which isn’t currently very big. Not implementing EME won’t help that. As others have said, this is not the hill to die on.
This all leads nicely onto my second point:
2. People who use Chrome
One of the best Tweets I found on the issue was somebody threatening to switch to Google Chrome because of this. I think the irony here is clear.
Yet, what astounds me more is not people threatening to switch, but people already using Chrome who want Mozilla to protect their rights.
Google is a for-profit company which exists to exploit users data. It’s collaborated with the NSA. It’s helped to lead the charge with Microsoft and Netflix for EME. Why on Earth, then, would you give Google support by using Chrome?
This may seem hypocritical from someone who uses Google’s services. Yet Google Search, Maps, Android (and so-on) are unparalleled. Chrome isn’t.
The single easiest thing you can do to support Mozilla is to use Firefox. It gives Mozilla the influence it needs to fight.
3. People who think Mozilla can single-handedly ‘change the industry’
I hate DRM as much as the next guy and I think copyright is fundamentally broken - it’s why I’m a member of the Pirate Party, it’s why I donate to ORG and EFF, and it’s through these avenues I expect to see real change.
Mozilla can only change the industry with user support. And users don’t care about DRM, they only care that video works. We clearly saw this with WebM and H.264.
There’s work to be done, but it can’t be done if Mozilla loses its influence, and it can only be done with the support (not ire) of other organisations.
Users want DRM. We should give them DRM. That doesn’t mean Mozilla supports DRM, and it doesn’t mean Mozilla can’t educate users about what DRM means (and there are some very good signs of that being bundled into Webmaker soon).
In conclusion
Don’t be disappointed in Mozilla.
Be disappointed in Google, Microsoft and Apple for implementing this first, and backing Mozilla into a corner.
Be disappointed in Netflix and its friends (including, surprisingly, the BBC!) calling for DRM.
Be disappointed in your elected representatives creating an environment where it is potentially illegal to say specific things about DRM.
Now go out, educate users about what DRM means, and why it’s bad. Use Firefox, and donate time or money to Mozilla to give it the influence it needs. Support organisations (such as EFF, ORG, FSF, FSFE) and political parties who represent your views on DRM and Copyright reform.
This is by no means the end of the battle over DRM and Copyright - it’s just the beginning.
Your missing the point, and the problem. Nobody is saying users should be prohibited or prevented from installing digital restrictions software. What we're saying is Mozilla shouldn't be encouraging, or enabling it. Rather they should be discouraging users from using it. Words like “spyware” and “malware” should be used to describe these anti-user digital restrictions systems.
The user should not be forced to give up control, security, and privacy just to accommodate an industries interests in making greater profit. Largely this profit is made via deception, not via preventing piracy using digital restrictions. Pirates will continue to be able to pirate regardless of widespread us of digital restriction systems.
However what digital restrictions do is hand over more and more control to the companies that be of users systems and use of the legitimately purchased goods. As an example if I purchased software in 1990 I'd generally be able to install it on any system I owned. I didn't have to re-purchase the software when I bought a new computer. Nor did I have to tell the entity anything about myself.
Somehow, they discovered that their previous CEO, who had made it clear that he would absolutely refuse to put DRM in Firefox, had made an embarrassing political donation, and forced him out of the company.
They were tricked by Google. Google said, they would soon remove support for H.264, but never made it true.
Now they have learned I suppose that they can't influence the whole browser market, when they are alone. There was also this problem that ogv didn't work on IOS devices, and most HTML5 video pages back then were designed for the IPhone, as every website owner assumed (and still assumes) that every browser has flash. So the website owners only supported H.264 as it would run on IPhone.
The Free Software Foundation want's Mozilla to stop enabling companies from taking away control from the user. These companies have malicious intent and putting up pirating as it presents a reasonable explanation as to the "need" of these systems. Digital restrictions don't actually prevent pirates from pirating content. It's that simple.
If all the major browser vendors succumb to an easy to use digital restriction mechanism. We're all going to be negatively impacted even if the browser we use don't enable easy installation of digital restriction software. Sites with mere video clips like YouTube that nobody pirates will end up using digital restrictions. News sites which at one time had digital restriction free video clips will be encumbered an unavailable to digital restriction free users. Free software users already have this problem as do users of many consumer products which don't include Adobe Flash. Lets not make this problem any worse than it already is.
Here we go again. The usual FOSS battle between impossible idealism and pragmatism.
/. with all the evil minifed javascript would make us sinners. Of course, the FSF morals don't extend to it having qualms about taking HP, Google and IBM dirty money.
If Firefox wants to allow for a plugin that enables DRM, what of it? The users can make their own choice. They're not including it in the browser.
I know it's popular to pay lip service to the FSF but if they had their way we would all be hypocrites. Just posting on
The idea that software needs to free is bullshit, i want to run whatever i want on my system. Don't you? I don't want my morals decided by the FSF.
Current support is accomplished by interfacing to the OS, the cisco binaries are not out yet, but we can hope. And then Mozilla would still need to implement it and then it would take at least 12 weeks until it is tested and ships to the users.
I don't mind Mozilla adding DRM support in for those users who want it, but it should be treated a bit like self-signed certificates currently are -- there should be a warning raised before displaying any DRM content that alerts the user to the possible consequences of viewing that content.
Tell Mozilla that he's anti-fanny bandit so they'll fire him and reverse his decision.
How about offer two versions of Firefox and see which one people choose?
.... and all of them pretty much suck. Lack of stability (as in constant crashes), memory issues and incompatibility with most plugins are common in all of them.
There was a time when one used IE, but along came Mozilla. Mozilla proved more successfull because it was DRM intollerant. I guess I have to find a browser that is DRM intollerant; any suggestions?
What you're really saying is that Mozilla should screw over a majority of its users on your behalf. Get down off your high horse, don't use the non-free EME blobs, and let everyone get one with their lives.
If Mozilla gives up its users they've got nothing left to offer.
If Firefox no longer has any users because the browser won't do what the users need, they've got nothing to offer either.
loss of browser market share
They'll lose market share for implementing DRM.
I now can't even readjust the forward/back buttons to be seperate from the URI bar, which is a huge inconvenience to me, since my default setup has them next to the reload stop buttons (which they'd already ruined by making them automatically merge without any visible or explicit way to keep them seperate like previous versions of every netscape/mozilla product since the original has either had or allowed.)
Unfortunately for me the only two options that are 'up to date' are Firefox and Chromium. And transitioning to something else loses me all the plugins that had me migrate to them in the first place.
Most do not understand about DRM, and that is what Mozilla is acting upon--complacency. Sure, you have a handful who understand the dangers of DRM, and why it is important to have a free internet and free open software but not enough. That is why Mozilla caves in, not enough users hold them accountable. Most of their funding comes from Google anyway. More need to be educated about this. When Stallman started the GNU operating system, their numbers were few. Now GNU is a bigger force. It may be time for another browser that respects the users' freedom. To Mozilla, I say, Fork You!
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Go for QupZilla, the GPLv3 browser you need!
The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser market share.
The iconic animated version of Let It Go voiced by Idina Menzel is approaching 230 million views on YouTube --- all licensed Frozen content distributed through YouTube alone probably accounts for 500-550 million page views, with no end in sight.
These are big numbers, and big numbers matter to Google ---
which isn't paying the Moz Foundation $300 million a year for links to mass market content Firefox can't display, but its rivals can.
The foundation has an ongoing deal with Google to make Google search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site has also been made the default home page of Firefox. The original contract expired in November 2006. On 20 December 2011 Mozilla announced that the contract was once again renewed for at least three years to November 2014, at three times the amount previously paid, or nearly US$300 million annually.
Mozilla Foundation
Already, FSF is supporting QupZilla for its free nature. Firefox prevents others from selling the software. But QupZilla is 100% free as in freedom with GPLv3. So it is time to change!!!
http://www.qupzilla.com/
I wonder if anyone technically competent and influential has recently left the company...
You are not the first person to suspect that. From the link:
Consider these three blog posts from three Mozilla figures, including Eich: [snip] Eich stood firmly in the way of Mozilla incorporating DRM into Firefox. Now that he's gone, and his technological authority with him, Mozilla immediately caved to Hollywood interests.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I'm too lazy to find the source right now, but my recollection was that Mozilla was first to make a stance against H.264 (in order to not partition the Linux out), prior all those stories of Google dropping support for H.264 in Chrome (which I guess they never did, after all).
But what Mozilla did was a good step. Almost every browser in the wild ships with a flash plugin. Flash is worse than any CDM.
Flash is a well understood protocol and there are plenty of tools out there to strip the security from flash video streams.
I'm inclined to think it's better the evil we know than some html DRM that we don't.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The fact that I actually agree with the FSF's position is irrelevant. Why is it that, the only time the FSF gets into the news, it is when the organization is spouting "Negative Waves"? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Need Mo' Positiv Waves.
Because DRM is gay... and they don't want to be accused of bigotry.
Truly, we got an offer we couldn't decline.
That is not true. Please, don't make accusations like that without evidence!
Just like Ghostery and Adblock. What a shame. Both of those blow, FF doesn't.
Flash is no longer required to play video on many websites. Most youtube videos currently play in the html5 player. This is just a step backwards.
This isn't for Youtube.
lol, they wrote a wrapped for another companies plugin. That's it. You don't have to use or install the DRM. All they're doing is giving you a "Safer" way to install it. They're taking lemons and making lemonade. This idea that open software shouldn't be open to closed software is misguided and arrogant. The one thing open source needs to avoid is giving corporate management the idea that when they use open source they're going to be somehow pigeon holing themselves. It needs to be REALLY open. Eventually people will come around because choosing open really is the correct decision. Give them an excuse to not use it, like you can't use the software to access a major portion of the content out there, and they really will not chose it.
How long will it take to crack this DRM? 6 months at most. Probably more like 6 days. Why are we pretending like this is even remotely a big deal? It will be abandoned in short order.
Flash is a well understood protocol and there are plenty of tools out there to strip the security from flash video streams. I'm inclined to think it's better the evil we know than some html DRM that we don't.
It's not just flash, it's also silverlight and googles DRM infected videolan plugin that this avoid...
Things like flash have giant codebases and can spy on users, Andreas, CTO at Mozilla did promise in his blog post that he would ensure privacy of users and so that adobes DRM thingy can't spy unhindered.
IMO this is the lesser evil.
Either way, the majority just want to watch netflix, they don't care. And this will provide a less buggy experience than flash or silverlight.
Personally, I think that when the revenue stream from online distribution becomes the primary source of income for the movie industry, then DRM will go away. Because DRM will always provide an inferior experience, more bugs, less stability and it is more expensive to stream... Than some static stream which can be distributed using a simple CDN. I think we have to be patient, DRM will die on it's own.
technical means for rental of non-free videos on demand
How do non-DRMed games stop copyright infringement?
PC games that aren't massively multiplayer are typically purchased rather than rented, except in the case of F2P games with an abusive energy mechanic. Movies, on the other hand, tend to be watched once unless they're A. cult classics or B. animated movies for single-digit-year-olds.
This dispute is reminiscent of the doctrinaire disputes common in the early history of the Church. The issues were eventually resolved over hundreds of years and the unpleasant deaths of thousands of heretics. Perhaps DRM disputes will be resolved in a shorter period with far less bloodshed.
As mozilla supported faggotry, it was a matter of time for them to support drm and other proprietary anal penetrators.
Chrome has nearly 50% of the browser market share all it itself... if Mozilla had just decided to not support it, then all it would accomplish by not implementing it is delegating itself to a future "unsupported browser" list... we'd be back to the good old days (sarcasm intended) when IE had a dominant market share and half of the websites out there wouldn't support anything else, except this time it'd be chrome and not IE that you'd have to have.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Wouldn't the GNU browser be GNOME Web - previously Epiphany?
The Pale Moon version of Firefox appears to have better management than Mozilla Foundation gives Firefox.
.01 cent? It's easy money, pai
Pale Moon Windows version
Pale Moon Linux version
Here are some of the advantages:
1) Pale Moon has a 64-bit version. Firefox doesn't. The 64-bit Pale Moon uses the Firefox add-ons; there are no problems except with some unusual add-ons.
2) The "Find in page" is better in Pale Moon. In Firefox the "Find in page" field is on the left of the screen and the "Highlight All" and "Match Case" buttons are on the right. In Pale Moon they are together so that you immediately see if something is chosen from a former search. A small UI detail like that is not, in itself, as important as the fact that Mozilla Foundation could make such a careless mistake.
3) Pale Moon is said to be more stable than Firefox. The memory-hogging flaws in Firefox are so widely acknowledged that there are at least 13 add-ons for re-starting Firefox: Firefox Re-start Add-ons. I use Restartless Restart.
4) Pale Moon management is independent of the forces that guide Firefox. Pale Moon is in no way associated with Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation seems to feel forced to change Firefox in ways most users don't want.
Whoever writes the Pale Moon web site seems to be very knowledgeable and a good manager.
More information about Pale Moon: See the Pale Moon FAQ. Here is a quote:
"As Pale Moon has developed, so has the amount of individual code for the browser, steadily diverting Pale Moon from its sibling in the direction aimed for in this browser -- having transformed it from an optimized build into a true "fork" of Firefox."
Pale Moon migration tool: Pale Moon has a profile migration tool.
Questions about Firefox:
The management of Firefox is apparently looking for ways to abuse users so that it can make more money. See this Slashdot story: Mozilla Ditches Firefox's New-Tab Monetization Plans. Apparently Firefox management wanted to adopt that method of abuse and found that it wasn't possible. This story we are reading now: Free Software Foundation Condemns Mozilla's Move To Support DRM In Firefox discusses another example.
Have you seen $311,000,000 of yearly development of Firefox? Mitchell Baker is the "Executive Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation". She is a lawyer with no technical knowledge, apparently.
See The State of Mozilla: 2012 Annual Report -- Frequently Asked Questions. Quoting: (Seriously, this is copied from the site.) "Mozilla's consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2012 was $311M (US), up approximately 90 percent from $163M in 2011."
Who gets the money? How it is spent? The amount of money is shocking to me. When someone clicks on an ad, Google may get 10 cents or 50 cents or $1.50. The cost to Google of linking to an ad is maybe
Now that he's gone, and his technological authority with him, Mozilla immediately caved to Hollywood interests.
And still, a native H264 decoder is missing. Seems that Hollywood and Google pay them to ensure flash DRM and advertising can continue to stream down the pipe unimpeded. If you change your UA string to Safari on iPhone, you get content native to those systems, sans flash and sans ads. They have no control or interests there.
Now that I think about it, isn't DRM perfect for countering your ad blocking? After all, when you monopolize the delivery system in a way that trusted extensions will not be allowed to control, you return control back to the big players. Google is not stupid. They do things slowly, like they removed the Javascript disable checkbox.
Or install a different OS on the phone
A lot of device manufacturers lock the bootloader to cut warranty support costs.
or watch the video on a TV
HDCP.
or run the video through analog & back before attempting to stream it
HDCP. Or are you referring to pointing a camera at the screen?
One could pocket the money & visit slashdot instead.
Where people will say "turn in your geek card" to someone who shows ignorance of particular movies.
Including a plugin interface that you know will be used for a Flash plugin is material cooperation with evil. To determine whether or not it is a good idea requires prudential judgement.
Including DRM is formal cooperation with evil. Formal cooperation with evil is always a mortal sin, that destroys your relationship with God, and renders you incapable of receiving the Eucharist.
"How long will it take to crack this DRM? 6 months at most. Probably more like 6 days. Why are we pretending like this is even remotely a big deal?"
The most important issue seems to be the overall direction Mozilla Foundation is going, not any one of these management issues alone:
Considering doing things against the interests of users. See this Slashdot story: Mozilla Ditches Firefox's New-Tab Monetization Plans
Mimicking Google's rapid release of new versions of the Chrome browser with new major version numbers, causing add-ons to fail.
Mimicking the Google Chrome user interface.
Avoiding fixing a MAJOR flaw in Firefox. As I said above, the memory-hogging flaws in Firefox are so widely acknowledged that there are at least 13 add-ons for re-starting Firefox: Firefox Re-start Add-ons.
Mis-handling of public relations.
Flash is worse than any CDM.
How so? I am able to download videos from any site that uses Flash with a Firefox addon for ages now. The video file I can convert to any other video format using ffmeg or other video tools. Will I still be able to do that with EME and a proprietary CDM? If the content providers says No, there is no way I will be able to download the video file any more.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
"... the binary blob won't be included, and won't be downloaded without the user's consent."
Do you realize that every time anyone installs a new version of Firefox, the former configuration is over-written to include a maintenance service that gives Mozilla Foundation control over the user's computer? At present, that configuration can be changed back to avoid that control, but understanding how to re-configure Firefox to avoid constant outside control is not something most users understand.
To me, the direction Mozilla Foundation is going is scary. Maybe there is "user consent" now, but won't be later. Maybe "user consent" will be available only to technically-knowledgeable people.
Wonder how much effort it takes to crack this DRM, I am betting not much just like anything else DRM wise... I don't blame Mozilla for adding this in, they pretty much had no choice. I just feel warm and fuzzy inside that it is easily crackable just like every other DRM that runs on my local PC..
And my question still is, why the fuck are people watching TV shows and movies on their goddamn computer?
Any DRM will be bypassed, sooner or later, you only will need to wait for the tools to be developed.
I don't think a DRM should be opposed because then you can't pirate anymore.
And "Flash is worse" was meant in terms of overall quality of flash. So take, for example, speed. The Actionscript runtime doesn't have the advancements of the recent javascript engines, so flash is slower. Flash is very undeterministic in its behaviour, clunky, closed-source, flash programs are hard to debug, and flash updater is super annoying. Also flash was given up by its creator, Adobe. Its just a huge pain, and apple was right when they told not to support it on the IPhone.
I think this happens when an organization starts worrying more about unrelated things like gay marriages and stuff that don't concern them and stop thinking about moral principles and things they should actually be doing, like free software.
APK sure does "soul-out" the souls of children quite often. The only thing we know is that he likes to rape children and needs to be locked up. I encourage everyone to report that sick fuck to the police and get him removed from society until he stops destroying innocent lives. His name is Alexander Peter Kowalski and he lives at 903 East Division St., Syracuse, NY 13208 (he was born 01/31/1965; his mother is Jan Kowalski, born 12/03/1933. I encourage everyone to call his neighbors and warn them that he may have raped and\or murdered their children and uses HOSTS files to evade police detection when he looks at child porn. If anyone lives in his area, I suggest printing out some fliers and stapling them around his neighborhood with a large "PAEDO WARNING!" on the top.
Could Pale Moon eventually replace Firefox? Suppose Pale Moon eventually has 10% of browser users? Will Google pay Pale Moon 10% of the money? Little by little, could it happen that Pale Moon is the world's favorite browser and Mozilla Foundation slowly dies?
Your the 10th person that posted about Pale Moon. Which will see me downloading it for sure. And downloading because this post is perhaps the most informative, yes, I could go and do a search for reviews, blogs, forums, to find out about the Browser and if it can be trusted. But this is why I read all the comments regardless of how they are rated.
I've got Comodo's 'Dragon' Browser, which is slightly faster but it opens several applications when I peak in the task manager, it is a fork of Chrome, but it has been re-coded to leave out Google's shenanigans and I can use the add-ons I am using in firefox. Since I updated to the latest Firefox it is terribly slow, using over 500k of memory at any given time, I have top games that use a half of that to run for crying out loud, and yes I have the plug-ins disabled. Reset Firefox via the 'Help menu' to dump all the add-ons in hopes of re-adding them to see what is going on, but it is just as slow without them as it is with them. I've been on Mozilla's forums and no one has any solution, and the company is obviously disinterested in fixing the ever worsting memory problems.
That and the fact you and other users have posted how corporate greed as driven Free Software into the sewers. I would make a point that MS, which is leading the way by forcing programming or CS into class rooms, will hamper youth from realizing their proprietary software isn't the only solution, there are other influences as well which makes me wonder how many Torvalds/Stallmans ect. will emerge to keep it going, more importantly how many worker bees will emerge to keep the entire thing going.
I have called out Mozilla for the last 15 years over what they claim to be free and open fundamentals, compared to what is actually going on behind the scenes. But the all great EFF keeps ranking them in the tops despite knowledgeable users fed up with their loss of 'free and open' fundamentals.
http://slashdot.org/submission...
There is speculation that this was the real reason Brendan Eich was kicked off.
He has a pet bear now?
> I think EME improves current situation, when some websites don't rely on flash anymore.
The main (only?) implementation of a module coming from Adobe, it's most probably Flash under the hood anyway.
> The sandbox approach from Mozilla is very non-intrusive in comparison to other DRM systems, and other EME browsers.
As in "we've lubricated the pill quite well, so it'll easier for you to swallow"?
Thanks. I'll decline anyway. And I'll opt for a browser which *makes this decision fucking explicit*.
Downloaded it, used the migration tool to transfer all my setting/add-ons/bookmarks, from Firefox. The difference is between night and day. Pale Moon is sooooo much faster, I forgot what it was like to have a simple, quick browser.
Outstanding!!
As with most things, there always seems to be hidden agendas.
Why Brendan Eich had to Go
I think just make it a optional extra. Like Ubuntu and other Linux distros do. Download additional nonfree/open software when installing. Ask once the browser has been updated or installed, whether you want none free DRM installed into the browser.
You know what, Linux has used nonfree software for years, Flash being one of them. Stopping using them is not going to stop the companies producing them. So you either install it and use it or be open source all the way, not have access to some content. It's about freedom of choice, that's what Mozilla should do.
Flash/Silverlight is going to be discontinued. What would companies like Netflix have used instead when that happens? Their only option would have been to write a browser extension for every browser that didn't support DRM, and require the user to install it. This is far worse for Netflix than existing extensions like Flash ever were.
So a DRM-free future was looking bright. That is, until the idiots at Mozilla decided to take the massive step backwards and support EME in their browser - which will make pushing DRM onto users more convenient than ever.
I was actually hopeful that one day my Debian on ARM machine would finally be able to play all video (and there's no ARM Flash builds). Since there's no official Firefox armel builds (see ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/fire...), I'd have to rebuild Firefox myself (unless the EME support makes it into my distro builds) however be surprised if Adobe's CDM would work on a Firefox rebuild for another architecture, or any kind of unofficial Firefox build for that matter.
I'm going to unsubscribe from Mozilla's newsletter and try switching to another free software browser in protest. Maybe Midori or Konqueror won't implement EME.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
Same feeling here. But I can see if it supports multi-core or not. This is the only thing that I miss in Firefox.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Show me a website, that is using this DRM crap.
I still could not found any.
I really don't see what the fuss is, Firefox already actively supports closed source DRM in the form of binary plugins like Flash. To me this is at least no worse, and at most much better due to the sandboxing of the plugin and more limited API; A binary plugin like Flash has access to your entire machine and is a massive security risk, these DRM plugins are designed to be sandboxed to only be able to do decoding and nothing else.
Google is an author of EME, which is probably an indicator that they do intend to use it.
Yeah, my understanding is people didn't like him because he bribed politicians in order to have some peoples freedom curtailed.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Could Pale Moon eventually replace Firefox?
Only if Pale Moon displays the content users want to see.
Suppose Pale Moon eventually has 10% of browser users? Will Google pay Pale Moon 10% of the money? Little by little, could it happen that Pale Moon is the world's favorite browser and Mozilla Foundation slowly dies?
Firefox is worth $300 million a year to Google only because it is a successful mass market browser that can hold its own against Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer.
His point (hopefully) is that you don't need flash to play flash videos. Will EME videos play in VLC, MPlayer, FFmpeg? Will it even work at all e.g. on PPC? If no, this is worse. Vastly worse than flash in fact. Even Silverlight is an order of magnitude better.
Bullshit. I use Firefox since years, and it has been 64 bit for ages. Also, it rarely crashes (I think the last time it crashed for me was some time last year, but really, don't remember details). The main source fore restarts are the high-frequency updates.
I don't think a DRM should be opposed because then you can't pirate anymore.
Sure, everyone is a pirate. YT videos are free and everyone can watch them, why would I pirate them?
His point (hopefully) is that you don't need flash to play flash videos. Will EME videos play in VLC, MPlayer, FFmpeg?
That is exactly my point. I hate to use the build-in video player in FF (and the build-in Pdf viewer is horrible, too). Also I want the advantages of a computer: that I can save the video and watch again later. Why should I degrade my computer to a TV (streaming only)? I know that Netflix and Hollywood wants to kill the computer model, I don't need Mozilla to help them with that.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Sure, they'll randomize the keys for different web sites, but as long as it's the same site they will get to track you exactly on every single page, with a signature-guaranteed unique identifier!
Soon coming to you: 50% of the web unusable without a Hollywood-signed DRM module.
Way to help destroying the free Internet! If you'd at least ask for $1MUSD/month from any web site that wants to use it you could at least avoid the worst misuse, but even that level of resistance is too much to ask for.
tl dr
Been looking for an alternative, and this looks good, will give it a shot.
Thanks.
... that it's appropriate to persecute people for thought crimes, I've decided I couldn't care less about what they do. They just don't matter to me any more.
Yeah! Use their own technology. Teach the pro-DRM folks a lesson in just how desirable their efforts are.
Ok, I didn't bother to read all 300 other posts to see if anyone else posted this idea, & more eloquently than I have. Oh well...
No, stop dreaming. If Mozilla dies, Pale Moon dies too. Or do you seriously think that PM can find enough world-class browser devs just to keep pace with the likes of Google, Microsoft and Apple? Do you think Mozilla's revenue is anywhere near the revenue of Google, Microsoft and Apple? Just because you want them to do your will doesn't mean they can.
And yes, I do see Mozilla putting the money to good use. You're just not paying any fucking attention to what they're actually doing, only what you want them to do. The amount of effort they're pumping into Firefox is astounding if you watch Bugzilla. Plus, I don't see a Pale Moon for mobiles. Mozilla is actually trying to take Firefox into a mobile future. Pale Moon will become irrelevant fast if they cling onto their niche in the dying desktop market, if not even Mozilla can maintain relevance there.
Frankly this copypasta is borderline insulting. Right now Pale Moon is barely more than a recompile of Firefox ESR with a few features enabled or disabled, and a few patches here and there. They make tall claims, but the one guy working on TenFourFox has probably put more effort into his custom fork of Firefox for PowerPC Macs. I also don't see Pale Moon devs contributing much back to Mozilla, just taking. They're no better than what Apple did to KHTML back in the day, and there's no reason for them to get a free ride off the hard work of others by taking their search engine revenue.
And oh wow.. you didn't even know there are 64-bit builds of Firefox? Or do you mean to marginalize everyone but Windows users in your quest to pretend that you're the voice of most Firefox users? Hell, without Mozilla there wouldn't even be a 64-bit compile option for Windows for Pale Moon to toggle and take credit for.
Again: without Mozilla, Pale Moon would die at this rate. And if Firefox's users are so fickle they would abandon Firefox for such inane reasons as the ones you list, then they deserve to lose the whole shebang. I hear a lot of whiners spouting this kind of crap, and yet none of them actually try to help Mozilla - they just take. No, earning them a few bucks of search engine revenue isn't contributing enough to justify this kind of selfish behavior.
Stop complaining about every little thing Mozilla does that you don't like, and start getting its user community organized in a positive manner. Do some actual research and legwork. Don't just pretend you represent "most users". Don't just try to build some childish narrative about Mozilla with a few cherry-picked factoids that suit your agenda. At the very least, if you do abandon Mozilla make sure to properly support whatever you end up using so it doesn't die because its "fans" are useless and haughty blowhards who can only see and say negative things about their "favorite" browser.
Fuck. I don't even use Firefox and I'm frustrated by your self-fulfilling prophecies. It's times like this I have to say "you do it to yourselves". You don't support Mozilla properly and then you sacrifice them on the altar of your principles without properly weighing what the end result will be.
nearly everyone who implements DRM says they are forced to do it, and this lack of accountability is how the practice sustains itself.
This, exactly.
Someone needs to stand up to the madness, and Firefox would have been a good candidate. They are not a 1% market share browser anymore. Their refusal to implement DRM could have forced Adobes hand.
Too bad that even the Free Software projects are now caught up in the web of market share and other business newspeak bullshit.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Firefox is 3rd in popularity, behind both Chrome and IE.
Google pays Mozilla because it of the standard Google referral program ... but they also will pay anyone who uses the proper referral system ... which includes Safari.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If it can be consumed, it'll be hacked. The DRM movement is misguided.... Give people the stuff they want the way they want to get it... Profits will result if the price is reasonable, simple... Make it difficult for the consumer so that piracy is the "easier" option and see what people go for!
Futurepower should have clarified: there's no 64-bit Windows build of Firefox. You can make one yourself, if you've got the know-how and the tools, but it's quite unofficial.
As you point out, the code is perfectly 64-bit clean and runs fine in 64-bit mode on other platforms. There's no *good* reason that Windows users are still stuck with 32 bits.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
That is exactly my point. I hate to use the build-in video player in FF (and the build-in Pdf viewer is horrible, too).
I like the built-in pdf viewer, not because I think its better than adobe native pdf viewer but because I don't have to install yet another closed source plugin, for which I don't know how much access it has to my system. It comes shipped with firefox as default, and I can view most pdfs with it. When I want to fill a form I have the time to click on the download button and do it on Okular.
Right now the pdf.js team is heavily optimizing the viewer, so the bad situation perhaps improves.
And the built-in video player is a huge simplification both for website creators and for browser owners. They don't have to find a swf file which plays my video, or buy any Adobe swf editor, they just simply place a <video> tag on the website. And for the built-in player you have a right-click menu, where you can get the URL of the video, if you want to download it. The video becomes a native citizen of the web, as it deserves to be.
Also I want the advantages of a computer: that I can save the video and watch again later. Why should I degrade my computer to a TV (streaming only)? I know that Netflix and Hollywood wants to kill the computer model, I don't need Mozilla to help them with that.
I also want these advantages, and I want a computer that obeys me and not some content provider that wants to enforce an outdated business model.
But does your addon also make DRMed flash vids downloadable? If no, then nothing has been lost, except that perhaps DRM can be made easier.
I also don't want DRM, but I think when it helps websites to get away from flash I can bear it to exist for the next couple years. In the long term, hollywood will realize that DRM is completely useless, and they have lost the war. At least I hope so.
We are only at the beginning of the war on general computation. We will one day build machines that will be better than us, and we will have to determine who controls those machines.
Mine crashes ca twice weekly ... of cause, I'm on the Aurora branch, sooo....
> Pale Moon has a 64-bit version. Firefox doesn't.
still wrong. Why is everybody still telling this?
$ file firefox
firefox: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, BuildID[sha1]=e06519b9e2b09c1b4e56b7ad11afc0d84e1b5aad, stripped
Well, it appears he was a technical Luddite as well as a human rights Luddite!
its for google play video.
http://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted...
sandbox? i do not think so. lets talk about DMA and other holes to get system access.
We need a 64-bit version we can give to staff and customers.
Also, when I do a search on the information you gave, all I find is links to discussion of problems.
When you say only negative things, you are much less powerful than if you provide solutions.
You said, "Stop complaining about every little thing Mozilla does that you don't like..." The memory-hogging instability of Firefox is not a "little thing". It's rough on people like myself who do a lot of research. The memory-hogging causes Firefox crashes, for example. Sometimes it makes Windows unstable. It is not always obvious that Windows is unstable, so it is necessary to re-start Windows and lose all other programs and the placements within those programs. Mozilla Foundation has ignored the memory-hogging instability of Firefox for perhaps 10 years. (The memory-hogging instability was there in Firefox version 1.0.5, 9 years ago.)
Also, consider the sociology of Mozilla Foundation. The direction things are being taken seems to be because of managers who have NO interest or knowledge of technology. That, to me, is scary. I'm not the only one who worries. See this article, published 2 days ago: Why Brendan Eich had to go. Look what the author says about Pale Moon.
I agree that Mozilla Foundation is, at present, in control of Firefox. The question is, how bad will things get? Is it possible that, if the money shifts, Mozilla Foundation will lose control?
Nowhere on the Pale Moon site did I see anything that outlined the methodology behind merging security fixes.
Does the Pale Moon version reflect the version of Firefox it's based on? This is not disclosed. Can we assume that every security fix has been merged? It doesn't say that, either.
Since the site says the code has diverged and that the intent is to diverge further, could it become impossible to merge certain security fixes?
How does the project deal with vulnerabilities it might introduce on its own? Perusing the site makes it plainly clear that this project is a one-man show.
Until all of these questions are answered, Pale Moon sounds quite dangerous to use. Avoiding Australis is not nearly enough to make it worth the risk of using.
If it works on 64-bit OS it doesn't mean that is a 64-bit software, Mozilla Firefox is not 64-bit.
WARNING: Revised history alert
Just a few short years ago Mozilla declined to support X.264 on ALL platforms event though there was a native plugin for Windows and open source support on other platforms. This was because H.264 uses a number of patented techniques and Mozilla wanted VP8, a patent-free codec.H.264 clearly won the war as every other browser supported H.264 for its HTM5 support. There was little support for VP8 (or, later, VP9).
Time passed and uptake on HTML5 using H.264 started growing in popularity. More and more pages failed to load properly on Firefox which increased the use of other browsers. Mozilla accepted the power of the market and added H.264 support to Firefox. Once the "standard" was written to allow DRM blobs, the handwriting was on the wall and Mozilla had learned the lesson well enough to at least provide a good, sandboxed way of supporting the blobs.
Do I like it? Hell, no! But I accept that most people simply don't care and it's either supporting DRM blobs or doing without and, while I might go with "do without", the vast majority will not.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
Flash is a vast improvement on EME.
Flash works on every browser that implements the Netscape plug-in protocol for any of the supported platforms (Win32, OS X ix86, GNU/Linux ix86, and a handful of others)
EME, on the other hand, requires a different binary for every single Browser/Platform implementation. There's not going to be a Hulu EME binary for "Win32", you'll need one instead for Win32+Firefox, or Win32+IE, or Win32+Opera, etc.
EME is absolutely horrible. It makes little sense, it's certainly worse than the status quo, and I'm baffled as to why it was ever proposed as a "standard" - it's unquestionably the dumbest HTML "standard" since the OBJECT tag.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Avoiding Australis is not nearly enough to make it worth the risk of using.
I disagree.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I think those are very sensible issues and questions. That's what we need, thoughtful consideration.
Go for it! Thank to /. thread on Firefox new version (new UI) I've discovered Pale Moon.
I've installed my usual extensions (Adblock, NoScript, Stylish) and the flash plugin.
It's the 64bit version of Pale Moon. I'm happy with it and see no reason going back to Firefox... bye! It's been quite a long time but I leave now.
I've even installed the Portable version, 64 bit also, with the same set of plugins.
No problems so far (2 weeks).
Keep in mind Google Voice and Video won't work with 64-bit Pale Moon. Learned this from experience; spent a considerable while trying to figure out why it wouldn't work before I pinpointed that as the problem. I keep a portable 32-bit install handy just for making voice calls in Gmail.
Good Americans don't pay attention to larger contexts. They pledge allegiance to princes and content themselves with the battle lines and Nerf bats their princes have conveniently provided for them.
Perhaps getting "more business-friendly leadership" at Mozilla was, in fact, the motive for ousting Eich. Identity politics, like any other politics, can be cynically exploited in the service of private interests at public expense. Anyone who's ever heard of WWII should understand that isn't just theoretical. Anyone who does not accept the possibility is a quisling for the empire who ought to be treated as an MSM outlet and forcefully excluded from the conversation.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Someone else would have written some other C compiler in response to some other bureaucratic stunt. Maybe Mark Williams and Coherent would have taken off instead.
Whig history... you do speak it.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
is not freedom." -Teller
You ate a lot of brightly-colored candies as a child, didn't you?
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
It's not safer, necessarily. The EME module is most likely delivered as a native binary; therefore the syscall interface is still available and the usual errors prevalent in dealing with structured data are still possible. To trust Adobe in any case is clear evidence of peasant desperation and/or paternalistic delusion.
When they come for the div tags, don't call me for help.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.