this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Your choice of browser matters — Google's Web DRM and the open internet

https://grafcube.codeberg.page/blog/2023/08/06/web-drm-api.html

I wrote this blog post to inform the people I know who aren't as tech savvy or otherwise don't put any thought into their choice of browser. Another goal is to help get enough awareness on the topic and make sure it fails.

@opensource @privacy #webintegrityapi #WEI #google #mozilla #chrome #firefox #chromium #foss #opensource #OpenWeb #privacy #drm #nodrm #drmfree #freesoftware #browser

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@grafcube @opensource @privacy

> But why do you use Chrome?

I can tell why I do. I used to use Firefox but had to move to Chromium long time ago for several reasons:

  1. It was nicer on RAM on a very small machine I had at the time. I think Firefox got better in that sense since then.

  2. Many web apps don't work quite well (or don't work at all) on anything but Chrome. That's a sin many lazy web developers make, and it forces their choice on the users.

[–] elbarto777 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The first point is no longer true. The second point is, sadly, quite relevant.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By just changing user agent string you can make the site work on Firefox too!

[–] elbarto777 1 points 1 year ago

True for many cases. But I was referring to cases in which the site really acts out because it's optimized for Chrome.

[–] cmhe 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To the second point, as a avid firefox user, I noticed that some Webapps seem to not depend on the Browser alone.

Even in safe mode, some Webapps sometimes work better on different systems than on others using the same Firefox version.

For instance youtube streaming seem to work better on my Linux laptop then on my Windows desktop, where it becomes stuttery. In Chromium there it works as well as Firefox on my Laptop.

What I want to say is that browsers and all the systems around this are very complicated. So your milage with the same browser will vary, and you might blame the wrong thing.

[–] elbarto777 1 points 1 year ago

Oh I'm aware of that. Network drivers, GPUs, running processes, etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

After using Firefox for 20 years, aside of maybe 3 times I never had any problems. So I can't confirm the second point at all