And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this “Web DRM”.
My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
It’s such a potent example of why we need antitrust laws to actually be applied to tech companies.
But our government here in the US is both run by geriatric idiots who don’t even know how to use a computer let alone regulate one and also is bought out by these companies.
This is a blatant, out in the open anti-competitive action that is suggested in this article and it shouldn’t legally be allowed to stand, but our politicians understand so little about how technology works that they’ll blindly accept Google telling them that it isn’t monopolistic rather than actually try to understand it.
All they need is a few major sites and tools requiring it to domino everything on the internet. Suddenly it’s standard.
Most businesses all use either chrome or Microsoft. And they’re both Chromium.
Literally just applying it to YouTube would send tremors throughout the internet. If YouTube stopped working in Safari or Firefox, anyone using those browsers who don’t really care and just liked those browsers for other reasons will give them up and go to a chromium based browser.
Google is fighting an apathy battle. One they know they can probably win because they own the Internet’s favorite content hub
It makes sense that they have YouTube in their sights for DRM lockdown.
Google will just say that pages with DRM will rank higher in their search and it’s all done.
It’s time to fork the community internet off the corporate one. Set up our own DRM-free sites and our own search engines, run by open source software. With blackjack and hookers.
We kinda have the small web (Gemini & Gopher), but it is a different, much simpler format than html (Gopher is literally plaintext)
I remember gopher but I haven’t used it for about 30 years. Does anyone still use that?
Doesn’t Firefox support DRM? I know on netacad.com it prompts me to enable it, or rather on a CCNA course. Or is it something else?
What you are mentioning is media DRM (think Netflix, Spotify). This is something entirely different: a mechanism to ensure the entire content of a web page is not tempered with.
Oh… thanks.