this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Firefox

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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/3376057

I held off on Windows 10 for as long as I could until my job required it. Now this nonsense. I hope this isn't the start of them joining on the web DRM bandwagon.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (26 children)

Nah, honestly I get this. They likely don’t let you run it in Safari either.

The problem is that each browser use different rendering and JavaScript engines. They all follow the same spec, but implement things differently, and at a different pace. Firefox tends to be really speedy with adding features.

Rendering is one thing, but for web apps the main issue is how they each implement JavaScript differently. Chromium uses the V8 engine, Safari uses JavaScriptCore, and Firefox uses SpiderMonkey.

Each one of these implementations handle certain JS features differently. Array.prototype.sort is a good example.

This means that when developing your application you need to keep track of what differences each browser has, and write/use polyfills or conditionals to ensure that your methods work as expected on all platforms.

This becomes cumbersome quickly, and easily leads to a messy code base and technical debt as the application grows.

It further complicates testing since you’ll need to test each release on each browser.

The easy cop-out solution is to just support a single platform, and direct people not on that platform to use the browser you’ve developed for.

The go-to choice there is obviously Chrome, since it has the most users. Photoshop Express is a free application developed with the hopes of hooking people onto buying a subscription. Thus they’d want as big a reach as possible. It would make no sense to develop for Firefox and push people to use that instead from a business perspective, most people wouldn’t just download a second browser just to use an app.

Edit: you can obviously spoof your user agent and bypass the check that way. Some features might be broken in Firefox though, and I wouldn’t expect a fix.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

this was a great explanation. I'm fully onboard with the "fuck Google and their web drm nonsense" but there has to be a disconnect from avoiding bad actors and recognizing the reality of the industry. ty for posting.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I feel like it’s necessary to mention that I’m just speculating, and don’t have any affiliation with Adobe, thus I can’t say for certain that I know why they choose to not support Firefox.

I’ve been in the position before though where I’ve chosen not to support non Blink/V8 browsers for the reasons listed above.

The fragmented nature of the web platform makes it a pain to develop for, in a way you don’t necessarily experience with “real” languages.

I have been, and honestly still am, of the opinion that Mozilla should just forego their engine and move to Chromium. Not because one is better than the other - if anything I think Mozilla’s implementations are, as they tend to be more “by the book” - but in unifying the web platform it’d be easier to develop for, and it would bring the added bonus of Google not having as big a monopoly on what goes on in Chromium.

Microsoft moving to Chromium was big in that sense, so I’d love to see an established FOSS vendor like Mozilla exert their influence on the project.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yes, move all browsers to chromium and give google absolute and total dominion of the internet.

What a fucking brilliant idea.

Problem isnt browsers, anyway. Problem is adobe locking their bullshit behind subscriptions and DRM instead of just being able to buy it and own it like you used to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Would Mozilla and Microsoft get control over Blink and Chromium? Surely someone has ultimate power over which pull requests are merged into main(or however they do it), and that's Google. Mozilla could fork, but now they're back to the problem of developing their own browser to compete with Chromium.

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