this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Am I the only one concerned Google may try to pull a fast one and block Mozilla from using the Widevine DRM?
Time to boycott widevine and insist websites switch to an open standard ... (though honestly good luck with that, Google might very well win that battle)
Not that easy since the W3C mandates everyone use Widevine or something similar. There was such a shitshow over this that the EFF pulled out of the org.
Google has the internet by the danglies via this little whatsit and the W3C can do nothing about it, because Google accounts for a sizable amount of their funding, and dropping Widevine/EME would break everything.
Also, Google could just more simply stop funding Firefox: Mozilla gets a lot of money from Google just to be the default search engine. Then again, maybe Firefox can switch to Bing or Duckduckgo, though I don't know if those would pay as well as Google.
Google is not funding Firefox only for the search engine being default. Google needs to keep Firefox alive because it is their sole competitor. If Firefox (Mozilla) goes down, Google can be accused for monopoly practices which is something they want to avoid.
I mean, they could also argue that all the Chromium based browsers are not Chrome, and so there is competition (we know how it really is, of course, but they have good lawyers...).
But I'm sure that's at least part of the reason why they keep funding it.
Chromium comes straight out of Google though. It is not another browser. It is the same engine. They give their engine for free and different companies use it to make their own flavors of the engine of the "Google browser".
They're actually increasing the market share of their browser engine by having chromium open source.This is not competition.
Mozilla has good lawyers too.
Nah they don't. If they had, the whole IE2 debacle would have been over in a court of law.
Yes of course, but I guess they could argue that legally they don't count as the same browser, because each company using chromium as a base for their browser is adding or changing it as they like.
Someone could, in fact, fork Chromium and bring back support for Manifest V2 extensions, or disable whatever things Google does to block ad blockers (and in fact, I bet someone will).
I've never seen any websites use it... btw mozilla kinda abuses widevine by running it in an isolated container (because no one wants proprietary drm software running directly on their machines!)
I wouldn’t really call that an abuse.
is there a word for good kind of abuse (?)