Slashdot Mirror
HTML5 DRM Standard Is a Go (arstechnica.com)
Artem Tashkinov writes: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry body that oversees development of HTML and related Web standards, has today published the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) specification as a Recommendation, marking its final blessing as an official Web standard. Final approval came after the W3C's members voted 58.4 percent to approve the spec, 30.8 percent to oppose, with 10.8 percent abstaining. EME provides a standard interface for DRM protection of media delivered through the browser. EME is not itself a DRM scheme; rather, it defines how Web content can work with third-party Content Decryption Modules (CDMs) that handle the proprietary decryption and rights-management portion. The principal groups favoring the development of EME have been streaming media companies such as Netflix and Microsoft, Google, and Apple, companies that both develop browsers and operate streaming media services. Following the announcement, EFF wrote a letter to W3C director, chief executive officer and team, in which it expressed its disappointment and said it was resignation from the W3C.
Every time EME comes up, a sizable number of Slashdotters announce they support it because "it's a DRM standard" and it means the end of plug-ins like Flash.
It is not a DRM standard. It's a standard for communication with plug-ins, known in this standard as CDMs.
And those plug-ins aren't like the old Netscape plug-ins, that worked (at the time) with every browser (except IE), with different versions only required for each CPU architecture and operating system combination. You won't be able to use your "Adobe DRM" plug-in for Edge under Firefox. In fact, every single browser, CPU, and operating system combination will require its own plug-in. Don't have one for your favorite browser? You're out of luck.
This isn't a standard, it's a non-standard. It's actually worse than Flash.
Shame on the W3C for adopting it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
When this protocol is used to disable adblock and any other previously free function of the web in the name of "muh intellectual property", don't cry about it.
This is the future you chose.......
I hope they enjoy their 20 silver. Assholes.
I remember a time when exclusive web content was locked behind walled gardens from AOL and MSN. I remember a time when most popular websites only worked with Internet Explorer and it's non-standard HTML extensions. I remember a time when most popular websites used shitty Adobe Flash widgets. Those things all went away because people won't stand for it (at least not once they have an alternative). The internet is a big place and if your website punishes users with unfriendly tech, there are a hundred other websites that will try to grab your users by giving them what they want.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
My opinion is that Mozilla is to blame for this happening.
It wasn't long ago that Firefox had 35% or more of the browser market, and this allowed Mozilla to exert a lot of influence over how the web developed. They could take a given web standard and say, "No, we don't like this. Either change it or we won't implement it." Since their browser was being used by 1 in 3 web users, them deciding not to support a standard could basically render that standard irrelevant.
But that's no longer the case. Now Firefox has only about 5% of the browser market, and even that may be a generous figure. Firefox has only 0.04% of the mobile market. Yes, you read that right! 0.04%! Not even half of a tenth of one percent!
Its 5% market share puts Firefox well, well, well behind Chrome. It puts Firefox well behind Safari. It puts Firefox well behind UC Browser for Android.
With its 5% of the market, Firefox is now down in the region of browsers like Opera Mini and Samsung Internet. It's getting to the point where even web developers don't care enough to test with Firefox, because it just isn't worth it.
Keep in mind that this is before Firefox 57 is released. Firefox 57 has been touted as only supporting WebExtensions extensions, which could very well break a lot of existing extensions. I could see this sort of breakage being the final straw for many of the few remaining Firefox users, who will likely move to Chrome, Safari or Edge, thus sending Firefox's market share even lower than it already is.
Nobody cares what the developers of a browser with 5% or less of the market think. Such a browser is seen as irrelevant, its users wishes are seen as irrelevant, and its developers' desires are seen as irrelevant. None of its competitors have to give a damn what Mozilla thinks these days. This means that Mozilla has limited influence over the future of the web.
It didn't need to be this way. Firefox was doing so well until Mozilla started making change after change that Firefox users did not want. I know a lot of people will claim, "But Google advertised Chrome!". But that's just an irrelevant excuse. People continued to use Chrome instead of Firefox because Chrome gave a much better experience. It became even sillier to use Firefox after Firefox started imitating Chrome's appearance and behavior more and more, but not Chrome's superior performance and small memory usage.
If Mozilla had only listened to its users, and not made unwanted changes to Firefox, then Firefox would likely still have 30% or more of the browser market. If they had gotten the performance of Firefox fixed up, Firefox could probably have even had over 50% of the market. But now it's at 5%, and this number is decreasing.
Mozilla could have influenced the future of the web. But now that Firefox has lost so much market share those driving the development of the web (Google, Apple and Microsoft) no longer have to care what Mozilla thinks or wants!
So what?
I don't mean I don't care about the issue, I mean that this decission was never in the hands of W3C in the first place.
It is, has been and will always be in the hands of the browser developers.
Google, Microsoft and Netflix are behind this (among others) so if W3C would not have approved, it would have happened anyway.
Behind nonsense about voluntary open standards and assertions that standards documents are nothing more suggestions reality is every player in the market uses existence of these "standards" documents... vendors, management and customers alike as excuses to argue and lobby for x, y and z to be supported - sometimes above and beyond what would otherwise be rationally justifiable.
For example MS using standards as an excuse to destroy what's left of POSIX compatibility in their C compilers even though there is otherwise little in the way of defensible basis for it.
It is sad, but it's also understandable.
Resigning after losing the EME fight stinks of the spoilt little child taking his bat and ball and storming off home in a huff after losing a game with the neighborhood kids.
That's not how I see it at all. They aren't leaving because of this one issue. The corporate takeover of the W3C had been causing increasing problems for a long time. I think this is more like the straw that broke the camel's back.
From my point of view, their leaving is makes sense -- their presence adds some validity to the committee that it doesn't deserve. If they can't actually accomplish any good by being on it (and it looks like they can't), then their remaining on it is actively harmful.
The geek doesn't like paying for content. I get that.
If that's what you think the issue is about, then you don't get it at all.
Then you have give it access to protected content.
It always had access to protected content. That also isn't the issue.
The issue is that the EME doesn't belong in the HTML standard in the first place. But, since it's going to be forced in no matter what, the secondary issue is that the EME mechanism doesn't actually achieve any of the things were being touted as the reason it should be in the standard.
It's a con job.
The idea that you shouldn't be able to record a copy of anything that plays on your machine is ridiculous.
Amen! As a consumer, it is not my problem if your business model isn't robust enough to survive people copying data that you sold them access to. Keep your goddamed failed encryption strategies out of my browser.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Perhaps you should list some examples of things Firefox users "didn't want"? Cause I'm pretty sure most people just want their browser to work with the websites they visit, and really don't care about much beyond that.
It became even sillier to use Firefox after Firefox started imitating Chrome's appearance and behavior more and more
I agree with this one, though I think you have cause and effect reversed: Mimicking Chrome I'm pretty sure was an attempt to draw users back who had already switched. Still silly to be sure, but I view it more as an after-the-fact panic move than a reason for their decline.
Chrome won because a) Google was still considered the perfect angel company at that point -- "Do no evil" was still the prevalent mindset, at least publicly, and everyone thought anything Google did would be amazing so they should give it a try. And b) Chrome was significantly faster (which gets back to the "just wants it to work" aspect,) so once they tried it there was little incentive to go back.
Really, Google wasn't even advertising it that much back in those days. The giant annoying popup you see now when you visit Google with something other than Chrome came (relatively) recently -- long after Firefox had fallen out of favor. Most of their "advertising" seemed to be word of mouth as much as anything (though I suppose some of the "word of mouth" may have been shills..)
And then of course there's Safari. All those Mac users no longer caring about Firefox after OSX came out since again, Safari passed the bar of "it just works."
Hell, if Microsoft had actually bothered maintaining and improving IE over those years it would probably still be the standard in Windows, antitrust lawsuits be damned. But as MS is wont to do, they sat back and shat the bed while the world moved around them and then tried to play catch up, adding plugins and whatnot at the eleventh hour after everyone had long stopped caring (and then they throw Edge in the mix as well, so even the users who did still care about IE can be confused as fuck by this new browser that has almost the same icon, works kind of the same for most pages.. and then suddenly breaks and tells you to load IE for the next page you click on..)
It seems that every time big business gets involved in something open on the internet, that project forks to keep a branch open. With the withdrawal of the EFF from W3C, did standards just fork? Will there now be two internet standards committees in the future? One for big business, one for everyone else?