What Is the Point of Mozilla?
&quot;Perhaps Mozilla&#x27;s biggest blunder was its decision to add support for the closed-source DRM W3C standard Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in Firefox.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s hard to imagine a perspective from which this is true that isn&#x27;t very narrowly constrained to anti-DRM activism.<p>If anything, implementing DRM was a significant positive for Firefox market share, unpleasant as the decision was. The article says:<p>&quot;Despite Mozilla&#x27;s kowtowing to the video streaming industries, Firefox users have continued to switch to other browsers anyway&quot;<p>Yes - and Mozilla would have lost even more users, faster, if they didn&#x27;t integrate DRM capabilities. The fact that Mozilla continued to lose users after DRM is not evidence that DRM was bad for market share. DRM stemmed the bleeding a bit.<p>I understand why people don&#x27;t like DRM, and I&#x27;m sympathetic, but almost nobody actually wants to use a browser without DRM because they&#x27;d be cut off from doing what they want to do (e.g. watch Netflix, YouTube). Before Mozilla added DRM directly, it supported Flash, which almost everyone had installed, and that was DRM plus a myriad of stability and security nightmares. Firefox didn&#x27;t &quot;add&quot; DRM so much as they retained it while throwing the rest of Flash out the window. Firefox is clearly better off now.<p>Mozilla&#x27;s biggest mistake is simply that after Firefox 3, Firefox was significantly surpassed in quality for many years by at least Chrome, maybe also Safari. Luckily Mozilla has closed the quality gap and is shipping a great browser today, but that painful period is probably going to continue to haunt them for a long time. They lost a lot of users because they weren&#x27;t shipping a browser that met modern quality standards. That was probably their single biggest mistake, and that&#x27;s why their market share is what it is today.