I doubt google cares very much.
Imagine if everyone used a browser made by an advertising company.
Good, but like all other evil motions like this, they’ll just take a short break, rebrand it / rework it / rename it / etc… and try again. And again. And again. Until everyone gets tired.
We have to stay diligent and keep defeating these assholes every time they try to take over the entire internet.
Yep.
Just look at Bethesdas paid mods fiasco. Only took two tries to get it accepted by a lot of people.
I don’t think that’s at all comparable. People expecting mods to be free just because they’re built off an existing game is absurdity. I haven’t charged for any mods, but I’ve spent more than enough time working on mods to justify a price tag.
Mods always used to be passion projects by volunteers, motivated purely by the love for the game and the community and the vision of the mod. This is what made the modding scene special to many. Is it really suprising that people are sad to see this culture being changed by monetization now, especially if they suddenly can’t afford mods?
Well, that’s nearly 3% of the market.
Google’s plan is foiled once again.
Of desktop, maybe.
Overall (and like 60% of all browsing is now mobile), no way. Mobile is where alternative browsers really suffer. Firefox actually seems OK for Android but it’s not quite as slick on many sites, probably due to them targeting Chrome. Apple force Safari on you so you can’t use Firefox at all.
Doesn’t matter. Websites will break on the rest of the browsers. Users will complain. All browsers now have Web DRM
Or web site owners that use it will go out of business because people don’t want to change their browsers. The companies will realize their decision was bad when all of a sudden their customers stop coming to their sites.
Google needs shut down! Or at least go back to being a search engine.
Call me when Safari weighs in with their 20% share. That’s a big enough group to actually kill this effort outright.
We need some new Anti-Monopoly governments to come into power and take a hatchet and machete to google and carve it up, and learn from the ATT/Ma Bell situation by making it so the richest fragment cant buy up all the remaining fragments after a couple decades and go all T2000 on the situation.
Or someone will somehow create a new web browser or add-on or just another branch of Chromium that fakes out the DRM somehow.
Like with ReVanced, for example. It’s a modified version of the YouTube app with an adblocker and several other bells and whistles added on (and the ability to remove a lot of Google’s own bells and whistles).
I doubt that but website owners that implement it might receive enough death threads to reconsider I guess, it’s the internet after all.
I’m not recommending death threats, but maybe hit them wheee it really hurts. Everyone quit using the internet for a week or two. And I do mean everyone around the world. Hell we survived quite well without the internet until the late 80’s, we have the knowledge, so let’s use it.
Unfortunately you’re probably right. Vivaldi has already said they will likely adopt this standard despite them disagreeing with it, I assume the same will happen to Firefox and Brave if the standard becomes widely adopted and used enough. Its not an easy issue to tackle. The good thing is we can fight back and push its adoption back as far as possible, as well as just avoiding and boycotting any websites that adopt the standard. I don’t know if the push back will be big enough to make an impact, but we at least have to try and do what we can.
We’ve already seen DRM garbage added to nearly every browser for media playback, despite massive backlash and concerns from organizations like the EFF. Mozilla didn’t want to adopt it iirc but they caved in to not lose market share and adopted it in the most user friendly and secure/privacy respective way that they could (Restricting the DRM in its own sandbox), so I could see something like that happen again unfortunately. However to be fair, this new Google DRM standard will be significantly worse and more of a problem than that DRM implementation, as this effects entire websites themselves now and is on a whole new scale and precedent, and not just for certain media content, so hopefully more can be done to prevent this and fight back.
Vivaldi has no choice. They have built their browser on Blink, which is made by Google. Google will force them to comply. Their way out would be to go back to the Opera web browser, which they gave up on over a decade ago.
Brave is also built on Chromium and they won’t be adding support for the API.
Mozilla:
Mozilla opposes this proposal…
I wish they took a stronger stance like Brave:
We won’t be shipping WEI support
C’mon Mozilla, show some gonads.
