This is a sad day for the web, but it was honestly one that was inevitable, and one that we all had a hand in making. If you want to know why we have DRM in the web, step 1 is taking a look in the mirror. Mozilla does not represent a majority market share of browser users, and so their voice in the W3C can be over-ruled by the voices of the other stakeholders, among them 3 enormous corporations with substantial media interests.

What follows is harsh, but I believe it to be true. Feel free to tell me that I am wrong, because I fully admit that I could be letting my emotions speak and I could be wrong.

Back in the day the web was ruled by a monopoly and it sucked. Mozilla released firefox but the web only broke free of microsoft's control because people like us did the work to break that control. I started using firefox, and I helped get most of my family members onto it. And many of my tech savvy friends did the same. Slowly but surely Mozilla's market share grew until it reached the point where Microsoft had to react and start to implement web standards, because if they didn't people weren't going to wait for them. They were going to switch to Firefox. And for a brief time we had the promise of a global network for the distribution of information not controlled by a single large corporation, but worked on by a committee which had a large part of its membership come from a public benefit corporation, whose only interest was empowering people to use that network to enhance their lives.

The web exploded, and fearful of being left behind large corporations got into the game with their own browsers. And rather than learn from what happened last time we let a large corporation get majority user share, we, and by "we" I mean you and I and all of the other people who should know better, went right for it.

Google released a cute cartoon describing the inception of chrome, beginning with hiring away people from Mozilla, talking about all of the great things their browser would provide. Microsoft started up development of IE again, and Apple released Safari. A lot of us looked at Firefox and said "Thanks for helping to save the web as we know it, but Chrome is so much more minimal! Safari as a great look and feel! See ya later". Richard Stallman gets a lot of flack around here for his eccentricity when it comes to computing, but goddammit the man can see past his own nose and understands that taking a dump on the only body advocating for you and I in favor of switching to something on such trivial concerns as "look and feel" is a great way to end up right where we are today. Where Mozilla has been marginalized so much by the relentless rush to Chrome that Google can go ahead and implement a DRM scheme on its proprietary OS and then force that through the Web Standards body with the help of Apple and Microsoft. When Mozilla doesn't have enough market share to stop it, because we've all switched over the Chrome based on Octane benchmark scores, and switched over our parents and friends. Where I routinely run into "desktop" sites that are straight up broken in Firefox and fine in Chrome because people can't bother with anything other than webkit prefixes, and where the mobile web is an even bigger disaster of Chrome/Safari specific junk.

So a few years from now, as you continue to bask in the glow google's super minimal interface and safari's incredible smoothness, as Chrome sends your browsing data back to Google and DRM starts to leak into other areas of the web (want to save that image? Sorry! Want to copy this text? Protected! Don't even think about looking at the source) cast a thought to Mozilla, probably still working away to do the best it can for you. Then ask yourself if selling out the web was worth it for the handful of beads you got from all the interests that wanted to close it down and lock it up, and if all the smoothness and look and feel in the world was worth it for the promise of what the web might have been had we not let it slip through our hands.