Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.
In light of Mozilla's recent parade of increasingly terrible decisions, there have been cries of "why doesn't someone fork it?" followed by responses of "here are 5 sketchy forks of it that get no development and that nobody uses". And inevitably following that, several people have made comments in the "Mozilla is an advertising company now" thread to the effect that it is now impossible for a non-corporate, open source project to actually implement a web browser, since a full implementation requires implementing DRM systems which you cannot implement without a license that the Content Mafia will not give you.
This is technically true. ("Technically" being the best kind of "true" in some circles.)
Blaming and shaming:
- It used to be that to watch Netflix (and others) in an open browser required the use of a third party proprietary plugin. That doesn't work any more: now Netflix will only work in a browser that natively implements DRM.
- That step happened because Mozilla took that license and implented DRM.
- That happened because: "it's in the W3C spec, we didn't have a choice."
- How did it get into the spec? Oh, it got into the spec because when the Content Mafia pressured W3C to include it, Mozilla caved. At the end of the day they said, "We approve of this and will implement it". Their mission -- their DUTY -- was to pound their shoe on the god damned table and say: "We do not approve, and will not implement if approved."
But they went and did it just the same.
"But muh market shares!" See, now we're back to the kitten-meat deli again.
(BTW, how's that market share looking these days? Adding DRM really helped you juice those numbers, did it? Nice hockey-stick growth you got there? Good, good.)
If you were unable to watch Netflix in Mozilla out of the box, yes, that would have impacted their market share. You know what else would have happened? Some third party patch would have solved that problem.
When Netscape released the first version of the Mozilla source with no cryptography in it due to US export restrictions, it was approximately 30 minutes before someone outside the US had patched it back in. I'm not exaggerating, it happened that night. This is the sort of software activism at which the open source community excels, even if it is "technically" illegal. ("Technically", again, being the best kind of illegal in some circles.)
Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.
Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of "growth hacking", with Google's ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.
And those dreams of growth and market penetration failed catastrophically anyway.
(Except for the C-suite, who made out quite well. And Google, who got exactly what they paid for: a decade of antitrust-prosecution insurance. It was never about ad revenue. The on-paper existence of Firefox as a hypothetical competitor kept the Federal wolves at bay, and that's all Google cared about.)
Now hear me out, but What If...? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
As I have said many times:
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.