Post by Computer Nerd KevMozilla's Original Sin
By Jamie Zawinski (one of the founders of Netscape and Mozilla.org)
June 22 2024
- https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/
"Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept
funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I
hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their
culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were
the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a
non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They
picked one. They picked the wrong one.
In light of Mozilla's recent parade of increasingly terrible
decisions, there have been cries of "why doesn't someone fork it?"
followed by responses of "here are 5 sketchy forks of it that get
no development and that nobody uses". And inevitably following
that, several people have made comments in the "Mozilla is an
advertising company now" thread to the effect that it is now
impossible for a non-corporate, open source project to actually
implement a web browser, since a full implementation requires
implementing DRM systems which you cannot implement without a
license that the Content Mafia will not give you.
This is technically true. ("Technically" being the best kind of
"true" in some circles.)" ...
I disagree with Jamie's sentiment here. The short version is that Mozilla,
for all its flaws, is making the best of a bad situation.
The core premise here is that Mozilla was doomed because of the inclusion of
DRM (presumably Widevine). That is pragmatism. Without Widevine support,
content websites like Netflix stop working. Now, I could see the argument
that Netflix writing a Firefox plugin would be preferable to shipping with
Widevine, but with Chrome having Widevine built in, it would likely encourage
average people (I will circle back to this) to just use Chrome.
The main article indicates that the author expected Firefox to insist on a
plugin architecture, rather than accepting that Widevine be a W3C standard.
While it certainly would have been noble for the Mozilla foundation to do so,
I am unconvinced that they were in a position to negotiate that way, and the
article makes no case which indicates that Mozilla would have won out if they
stuck to such a hardline stance.
The exception takes with Mozilla's motivations for taking Google's money here
is as impractical as it is contradictory with later statements. It is no
longer 1991. Firefox 1.0 (2004) had a 4.6MB Windows installer, and 3.5 (2009)
had a 7.7MB installer. Firefox 128 is 64MB. Even if I agree that some of that
is bloat that could be optimized, that is still a massive code base.
Web standards (controlled largely by Google) are constantly moving targets,
making it nearly impossible for a small open source team to voluntarily write
a new browser from the ground up. Even if an up-and-comer were to make some
inroads, they would likely either be bought out by Google or Microsoft, or
sued out of existence.
The natural consequence is that Firefox would have the same four options as
every other piece of software which is too big to be a 'labour of love': Have
users pay directly (which Netscape and Opera proved impractical long before
Chrome ruled), or make users the product, where other companies buy either
data or ad space. The last option is exactly what Firefox did: get a
corporate sponsor. Perhaps the worst possible sponsor (though some might
argue that Microsoft would have been worse), but a sponsor they got.
The article goes on to argue that Firefox could still ship without Widevine
and let the hacktivist community write some sort of patch or plug-in to make
it work. Well, that sounds good, until reality sets in. Shipping a browser
without SSL support in 1998 was at least somewhat acceptable. While HTTPS was
used on banking websites and similar security-conscious corners of the
internet, they were relatively rare in comparison to today, so an HTTP-only
browser would have been just fine for most cases.
Meanwhile, a community-driven implementation of SSL and a community driven
implementation of Widevine are incomparable. OpenSSL, and its predecessor
SSLeay, were already in existence, and their goal was to implement clearly
defined standards, and was not adversarial toward either developers or users.
None of this applies to Widevine.
Suppose this solution was explored. Netflix and Disney and all the other DRM
content producers would just say "use Chrome, we do not support Firefox".
They would not spend their own time developing a Firefox plugin. It would be
far more likely that they would work to thwart the community effort, leading
to a cat-and-mouse game with users caught in the middle. It would be most
likely that Mozilla would get caught in the middle and be 'asked' to make the
plugin harder to install and easier to detect. So, users would need to be
dedicated enough to using Firefox that they would go through a multi-step
install procedure that would need to be performed regularly, with users
constantly complaining about it not working due to the server side patching
around the plugins' implementation. This seems like one of the most
thankless, soul-sucking tasks one could undertake as a PAID job. The
community effort would not last long.
As a quick aside, the author describes Waterfox, Palemoon, and IceCat as
"sketchy forks", but is advocating for a community- driven DRM
implementation? Those forks are described as software that "nobody uses", yet
calls for Firefox to eschew DRM despite the admission that it would cost
market share? There is clear logical inconsistency here. I digress.
Mozilla exists, and is worth Google's money, because Google can get a tax
writeoff for the charitable donation while also ensuring there is a
competitor for them to point to if the US Department of Justice comes
knocking. Sadly, at this stage, that is what the organisation exists to do.
However, it seems pretty clear that too many users do not care. The handful
of us that are on Usenet still care, and the companies still care (the
"download Chrome" Bing search results are comical), but for good or for ill,
the free-for-all that caused IE-only and Netscape-only webpages in the 90's
and 2000's has shaken out to the point where most websites use CMS systems
like Wordpress and Wix, which in turn need to work reliably on two render
engines, Gecko and Webkit.
Unfortunately, there's no real way to make the internet happy. Too few
browsers, the internet yells "monopoly". Too many browsers, the internet
yells "fragmentation". Implement DRM in a browser, the internet yells "DRM is
a cancer". Don't implement DRM, the internet yells "sketchy fork that doesn't
play Amazon Prime videos". There's no winning, and the REAL case Jamie fails
to make is why, in 2024, it's a battle worth waging for anyone.