When It Comes to Technology, Mozilla and Firefox Are Illiberal
2022: Firefox Has DRM Even if You Turn off DRM
Recently, as in earlier this month, Mozilla got blasted for wasting CPU/battery juice (power) on "hey hi" (AI) nonsense in Firefox (Mozilla had long pivoted to this hype, which it still participates in). Prior to that many blasted the company for covert surveillance, for DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), and all sorts of other things.
Mozilla isn't the company that Mozilla wants you to think it is.
Last month in Planet Debian we saw one more person explaining to everyone how to "turn off" DRM in Firefox and hide the respective (and repulsive) pop-up/s. He was hardly the first person to discuss that [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and hiding the popup/s does not change the fact that it's still there, installed and waiting to be activated:
DRM in this context means proprietary software. Yes, Firefox contains proprietary software and one might therefore say that Firefox, in general, is proprietary software.
I still have Firefox ESR installed because some sites refuse to work with anything other than Chrome (or 'clones') and Firefox. Those are typically but not always 'webapps' (JavaScript and worse) of some kind.
Having proprietary software installed but not enabled does not make me too happy, but then again, Linux contains many proprietary blobs in it and unfortunately I have never used Linux-libre* (I don't oppose it, I just haven't had the chance).
Any time Mozilla posts something about liberal politics pay attention to how Mozilla, at the same time, also promotes proprietary software, Bytedance's TikTok (digital toxin), and all sorts of illiberal things. That's not to say that proprietary software is more evil than the Communist Party of China or the invasion of Ukraine. But still, if Mozilla was true to its alleged values, it would protect users instead of protecting the humongous salary of its CEO, who played along with Google's (or GAFAM's) DRM agenda and ended up giving Firefox as a gift to Microsoft.
If you're not happy with the direction Firefox has taken, consider moving to LibreWolf (Firefox sans the antifeatures). █
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* My wife and I haven't had a chance to use Linux-libre yet, but that might change in the near future. Heck, Linux is also getting some growing 'competition' from Hurd in the context of Debian. I doubt I'm ready to use Hurd, but Linux-libre is probably doable.