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Google's Web DRM is Worse than I Thought...
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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That was quick (Google integrating it). But of course it was...
About time I finally switch (back) to Firefox then. Have been using Vivaldi, but the only real solution is to move to a non-Chromium browser.
Thing is, if this takes off and websites adopt it, FF will be forced to integrate it aswell. I'd be fine with some websites not working in FF, but my mother will call me and say "the internet is broken". I guess Mozilla doesn't want and/or cannot afford that.
That is correct, but for now, Mozilla has the right stance on the matter.
I'm still waiting for what Apple's stance is. They integrated functionality into Safari that technically works similarly, but that's only used for captcha verification. I can see them choosing either side to be honest. They can embrace the Web Integrity API because it fits their "closed ecosystem" (in case of iOS devices) type of product quite well, but on the other hand they don't really have a website that would be suitable to use the Web Integrity API, so why would they give in to what Google wants? If Apple doesn't integrate Web Integrity API into Safari, I don't see any major website using it. They can't afford to lose ~28% of the mobile market.
Apple will follow suit: don't be taken in by the 'we love our customers' nonsense they like to present. They make billions in selling ads too, they just do it a little more quietly than Google.
Agreed. Apples stance on privacy is more about PR and keeping ad competitors at a disadvantage on their platform than actual privacy. Only reason they might not fall in line is if they feel there is enough public opposition to it to get some PR and make Google look bad. Not too optimistic on that though since most people are oblivious to the issue.
They don't sell ads on the web though, so I don't see how this would be related.
I kinda have two answers to this:
Not yet,
It was more an intent to show that they're not some shining defender of the ad-free private internet, who would never take action to defend a potential future revenue stream if they thought it might be profitable later.
Remember everyone, corporations are not your friends, your buddy, your pal, or even slightly gives a shit about you beyond how much money they can extract from your wallet and anything that's in the way of them doing so they'll work around, stomp on, and kill by any means necessary.
Likely true, but as someone pointed out in another thread, it should be possible to "technically" comply with WEI enforcement, and then have a transparent abstraction layer to extract the "enforced" markup and code, exposing it to the user-facing browser to interpret like it normally would.
It's some real asinine bullshit software engineering that shouldn't be necessary, but it should work.
What's keeping Vivaldi from removing it?
Exactly, why don't all these chromium-based browsers which came out against WEI don't fork Chromium to maintain a base version without this bullshit? And manifest V3 while they're at it.
It's likely a lot of work to maintain a fork of the Chromium/Blink engine with your own changes applied to it. I'm not sure how deeply the Web Integrity API is integrated into the code, but if it's anything more than a flag to disable it, it will likely be hard to keep integrating upstream changes timely while ensuring your fork still works.
Although Chromium/Blink is forked from WebKit, it's far from being WebKit these days.
But of course, Vivaldi could base their browser on WebKit or Gecko. Many of these "smaller" browsers tend to be based on Chromium though, likely because it's the most compatible (because of its marketshare).
And it's likely too much work for them to switch engines now.