Technology

The problem is that Mozilla dropped the ball so hard, by focusing on making their C-staff into millionaires instead of making a good product, that it no longer matters. Their market share is so small that Firefox compatibility no longer matters.

Soon websites will require that DRM and either Firefox will implement it or it will be unable to render those websites.

Why would they? It's FrEE maRKeT. Google can point to Edge and Safari as proof that they don't have a monopoly on browsers, so no anti-trust issue there no sireee. The fact that Edge is based on Chromium does not factor into this (in fact the EU loves it, just look at what they did to "liberalize" the electricity market, aside from some extremely anecdotal stories, it's all companies whose only job is to build a website and the fiscal "infrastructure" to buy energy from state-controlled producers to resell it at a markup using state-controlled energy distributors, but hey there is a private middleman so it's liberal and the innovation/investment dividends will pay out any year now... any year...).

The concept of the WWW being supported by free, standard, interoperable protocols was never codified into law. Despite how much good it has done so many industries to have a common free interoperable tech stack, it doesn't have to be this way; the French Minitel was a walled garden built by France Telecom, and that was 100% legal, because interoperability is not a legal requirement. The Apple Store and Game Consoles work under the same principle, you basically can't sell anything on there without abiding by some asinine rules (Apple has had some issues but IIRC that has to do with them abusing their monopoly position to extract 30 % of all sales, not with the fact that they have an exclusive App Store to begin with).

Also this whole bullshit is not new and was never legally challenged because there is no case. For years you could not even browse instagram in your browser because they "only supported the mobile app", which was a blatant way to force you into a walled garden where they can force you to watch as many ads as they want and where scraping is much harder.

Yeah, this is pretty much my take.

The web sites that are interested in this tool never wanted to be actual web sites. They wanted to be closed client-server systems with proprietary, opaque protocols… HTTP was just a convenient implementation to leverage.

What WEI does is basically allow all of these wanna-be walled gardens to become actual walled gardens.

They never wanted to be interoperable in the first place, so what are we losing? Good riddance.

Maybe with this in place, we’ll be able to start rebuilding the interoperable web that we had before VC money took it over.

We just need a compelling business model for it. “Free” ad-supported is toxic for open discourse, and now it’s functionally deprecated on the open web. I think that’s a good thing, but good changes are not necessarily easy to endure.

I’m not sure how we’ll do it. Attention tokens and all that crypto stuff seems like garbage, but having a thousand different subscriptions to get past paywalls is not great either.

It's DRM, but for the whole web.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/

I don't think that checks out.

Firefox only exists because it's primarily funded by Google. It's funded by Google to ensure they actually have some competition and avoid becoming a Monopoly.

If they kill Firefox or otherwise make it unusable they'll be shooting themselves in the foot.

However, if it ends up being a bad experience that no one wants to use, well that's not on them and they have no responsibility to fix it.

What will likely happen is Firefox will also adopt this DRM.

Not saying you don't realize, but Safari already has this tech. They call it Personal Access Tokens.