This is the strategy Microsoft tried over a decade ago with ActiveX. And Firefox saved us. It was starting to be normalized, to have to install ActiveX controls to view certain content.
Companies like CinemaNow[1] offered Netflix-like streaming movie services using Microsoft's ActiveX based Janus DRM over a decade ago. Thankfully, the community had more of a backbone back then.
Firefox and Linux were not broken because they didn't support Microsoft's crummy software. I considered it a major feature, actually.
Microsoft was trying to push the narrative that if you wanted to truly get a first class experience of the web, you had to be running Windows and Internet Explorer. Microsoft made it easy to just use the Trident engine, and get locked into their ecosystem.
Now, the same thing is happening again, except that Mozilla is on board with it. It's only a matter of time until Firefox is just a wrapper for webkit, and websites will compel you to install EMEs that will force you to watch ads.
> Now, the same thing is happening again, except that Mozilla is on board with it.
Mozilla doesn't have as much leverage now that a large part of "the community" has abandoned Firefox for Chrome. If you care about these issues, stop and consider the effect of your choice in user agent.
> It's only a matter of time until Firefox is just a wrapper for webkit
It will be a very cold day in hell before this happens. Mozilla is only investing more in its browser engine tech with Quantum and Servo.
> Mozilla doesn't have as much leverage now that a large part of "the community" has abandoned Firefox for Chrome. If you care about these issues, stop and consider the effect of your choice in user agent.
Mozilla still has nearly an order of magnitude more market share than they did when activex was everywhere.
At the time that Firefox started really turning heads, it took an order of magnitude less money to build a better browser. JIT innovations that were once just good research ideas from the Smalltalk world had an open source implementation in Java which then got ported to open source dynamic languages like Python (see polymorphic inline caching & similar techniques). Then Adobe came along and donated a bunch of it's JIT code form ActionScript to Mozilla as well. To top that off, Microsoft was visibly asleep at the wheel with respect to Internet Explorer.
All of this allowed Mozilla to both build a better browser and show the community a way forward with rich experiences that leveraged Javascript instead of ActiveX based solutions.
With Google pouring resources into Chrome and Microsoft actually paying attention to Edge, competition is much harder. Mozilla is spending large sums of money on Firefox and delivering an experience that is just okay compared to the other players.
> At the time that Firefox started really turning heads, it took an order of magnitude less money to build a better browser. JIT innovations that were once just good research ideas...
Is that really how things are, though? Isn't it possible that the underlying software ecosystem was manipulated by Google, so that they would have a problem to solve with Chrome?
Imagine if trends continue, and every website is just an "app" for a js vm. Then Google would really have the advantage. I don't think Mozilla could fight Google on their own turf like that.
Why should we let Google set the direction that our technology goes?
I encourage you to try out Firefox Nightly. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis has made me switch from Chrome to FF as the experience has improved greatly.
Mozilla also picked the wrong battles. Firefox languished while they chased mobile OSes and other projects. They have a much more formidable competitor in Google than they did with MS in the early days. So trying to go for both Android and Chrome's market when there isn't a whole lot wrong with those products is a hard sell.
I use Chrome because it doesn't look and feel like a dated browser with substandard performance. It is up to Mozilla to modernize and improve their browser in order for me to care about them and not the other way around.
>>browsers have less leverage as more Netflix subscribers get their content either on set-top boxes or mobile devices (where Netflix has total end-to-end control), and fewer are stuck with browsers.
Yea they will us Blink, not Webkit...
Mozilla is trying their hardest to make Firefox the best Chrome Clone on the market...
Ofcourse Vivaldi is giving them a run for their money, but I I am sure Adopting EME, Web Extensions, and every other Chrome Tech will really get them their market share back..
Interesting point about ActiveX, but I think that Flash killed (or stopped the proliferation) of ActiveX, at least for video. Flash "just worked".
Don't get me wrong, I use Firefox and I don't use Netflix or Flash, but most people are quite content on Chrome. For Firefox to stand up to Netflix, it would need more than at 15% market share. Firefox is doing what it can to survive. If someone lacks a backbone, it's the W3C :(
Now such companies lobby for WebAssembly. A software blob running in your browser. It's actually similar evil as ECE.
They will recompile their old rusty software to the web. eg Newspapers will make websites as blob-applications - Adblockers won't work any more. New forms of DRM will slip into web world this way.
We need a fork of Firefox/Servo-based/Chronium that is more lightweight, becomes mainstream pretty fast with a great community and has no inbuilt DRM and no WebAssembly support.
> It's only a matter of time until Firefox is just a wrapper for webkit
This tired "Firefox is just turning into Chrome because Australis/DRM/web extensions/xkcd 1172" hyperbole simply couldn't be further from the truth. Mozilla is building an entirely new rendering engine with Servo [1], parts of which will be shipping in Firefox this year [2].
I like the idea of that, but, Mozilla is absolutely abandoning what made Firefox amazing.
They are embracing this strange thing where they think that they are a for-profit app platform, like Google, when they aren't. So they're locking down their web browser.
It makes sense for Google to do that. Not Mozilla.
Firefox is supposed to be like emacs. Should emacs need permission from some central authority to install an extension?
Many of Google's UX methodologies make zero sense when Firefox implements them.
It makes sense for Chrome to be locked down and customizable. It makes sense for iOS to be locked down.
I'm not thrilled about it, but it makes sense to maintain the control and integrity of the platform, for a business perspective.
But there is no reason to do it for Firefox whatsoever. I should really document this, but, I have an entire set of Firefox profile "distros" that I use for some very specific purposes, with Firefox. And they're slowly being phased out. Because Mozilla is a cargo cult.
This would be like if Ubuntu decided to forbid you from using apt to install anything except by authorized repos, in order to be more like iOS. Because people like iOS. So if we superficially copy them, we will inherit some of that magic.
Technical decisions for Chrome are often made pragmatically, like, they will decide to use a native pdf reader instead of a javascript one, purely for performance reasons, even if it is a step in the wrong direction for portability. That is a business decision, and the same as any number of Microsoft's inconsistent implementation decisions for Internet Explorer. You don't have to COPY them. Maybe try offering an alternative?
And let me be clear: at Mozilla, they FETISHIZE Chrome. The sole justification for removing FTP support from Firefox[1] was a single pasted URL from Chrome's bug tracker announcing that Chrome was removing FTP support.
Google doesn't even have to try. They lead Mozilla around by the nose. Google could announce that they were removing the address bar, and the sycophants at Mozilla would have already officially announce that they too were deprecating the address bar as being obsolete, because Google said so.
Companies like CinemaNow[1] offered Netflix-like streaming movie services using Microsoft's ActiveX based Janus DRM over a decade ago. Thankfully, the community had more of a backbone back then.
Firefox and Linux were not broken because they didn't support Microsoft's crummy software. I considered it a major feature, actually.
Microsoft was trying to push the narrative that if you wanted to truly get a first class experience of the web, you had to be running Windows and Internet Explorer. Microsoft made it easy to just use the Trident engine, and get locked into their ecosystem.
Now, the same thing is happening again, except that Mozilla is on board with it. It's only a matter of time until Firefox is just a wrapper for webkit, and websites will compel you to install EMEs that will force you to watch ads.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaNow