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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday May 13 2015, @08:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-so-open-anymore dept.

Mozilla Firefox 38 has been released. It adds the <picture> element, Ruby annotation support, and Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a form of digital rights management for HTML5 video. It also automatically downloads Adobe's Primetime Content Decryption Module (CDM) on 32-bit versions of Firefox on Windows Vista and newer Windows systems. The Register reports:

The nonprofit grudgingly agreed to add EME support to Firefox last year, despite the vocal objections of both Mozilla's then-CTO Brendan Eich and the Free Software Foundation. "Nearly everyone who implements DRM says they are forced to do it" the FSF said at the time, "and this lack of accountability is how the practice sustains itself."

Nonetheless, Mozilla promoted Firefox 38 to the Release channel on Tuesday, complete with EME enabled – although it said it's still doing so reluctantly. "We don't believe DRM is a desirable market solution, but it's currently the only way to watch a sought-after segment of content," Mozilla senior veep of legal affairs Danielle Dixon-Thayer said in a blog post.

The first firm to leap at the chance to shovel its DRM into Firefox was Adobe, whose Primetime Content Delivery Module for decoding encrypted content shipped with Firefox 38 on Tuesday. Thayer said various companies, including Netflix, are already evaluating Adobe's tech to see if it meets their requirements. Mozilla says that because Adobe's CDM is proprietary "black box" software, it has made certain to wrap it in a sandbox within Firefox so that its code can't interfere with the rest of the browser. (Maybe that's why it took a year to get it integrated.)

The CDM will issue an alert when it's on a site that uses DRM-wrapped content, so people who don't want to use it will have the option of bowing out. If you don't want your browser tainted by DRM at all, you still have options. You can disable the Adobe Primetime CDM so it never activates. If that's not good enough, there's a menu option in Firefox that lets you opt out of DRM altogether, after which you can delete the Primetime CDM (or any future CDMs from other vendors) from your hard drive. Finally, if you don't want DRM in your browser and you don't want to bother with any of the above, Mozilla has made available a separate download that doesn't include the Primetime CDM and has DRM disabled by default.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday May 13 2015, @11:29PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday May 13 2015, @11:29PM (#182704) Journal

    Give Midori [midori-browser.org] a try. The Windows build is pretty shakey, but it's really come together in the past couple years under Linux.

    Gaaah, I just clicked my own link and it's gone web 2.0. The browser itself is still good.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 14 2015, @08:23AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday May 14 2015, @08:23AM (#182836) Journal

    The question is: Does it support the important extensions (or, alternatively, support the functionality natively)?

    In particular, does it support NoScript (note: just globally disabling scripts is not the same), and something along the lines of RequestPolicy/Policeman, Cookie Monster nad RefControl?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday May 16 2015, @12:47PM

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Saturday May 16 2015, @12:47PM (#183738) Journal

      NoScript™, no, but there's an equivalent plugin called NoJS that does a pretty good job. I was able to get the green site to work and my credit union's site. (Naturally, this site, built with superior technology, does not require any tweaks.) In fact, it was pre-enabled on BodhiLinux 2.0 (although beware, BodhiLinux is based on Ubuntu—systemd coming soon to a distro near you). AdBlock™, no, but the advertisement blocker extension seems to be doing good also.

      There are two cookie management extensions, but I haven't used either. Looking at others I don't use, apparently there's a feed (RSS/Atom/etc) aggregator, mouse gestures, and vertical tabs.

      I use Ghostery in Chromium, but I don't think there's a Midori equivalent. Also forget YouTube and Vimeo (granted, Vimeo somehow manages to spin up the fans on my video card like I'm playing Star Citizen on my desktop).

      RefControl I'm not sure about, but I'd assume no.