This is most certainly the wrong choice, but people need to understand they essentially had no choice. Their options were rather limited:
Option 1) Stick to your laurels and refuse to implement DRM. Other browser vendors implement DRM, certain parts of the web become inaccessible via Firefox as DRM is implemented into more and more web services (think Youtube, Vimeo, Netflix, Hulu). Firefox's lack of DRM means its users are being disadvantaged.
Option 2) Implement DRM. Accept temporary defeat, don't lose browser share to Chrome and continue fighting from within against DRM.
Which option do you think sounds more appealing to Mozilla? Die on your sword, keep the trust of your dwindling user base or implement DRM and retain most of your user base (minus the people that will leave because of this decision). I think someone needs to create a fork and build a DRM-less browser, that's the beautiful thing about open source, don't like something, change it.
Option 3) Stick to your laurels and refuse to implement DRM in the browser, but let people install a third-party plugin that adds the DRM capability. Keep your own hands clean, let Adobe do the dirty work (the DRM blob was written by Adobe after all), and keep all your users too!
The greatest thing about Firefox is the add-on/plugin ecosystem. Why not take advantage of it to give users a real choice? Firefox already does the same thing with Flash, a proprietary but easily installable plugin.
> Firefox's lack of DRM means its users are being disadvantaged.
Firefox's lack of DRM would mean that users are being encouraged to used the services not encumbered with this nonsense, instead of all gravitating to whichever DRM service is most popular.
Mozilla supporting DRM is a failure because of Metcalfe's Law[1]. By giving access to the network of people using DRM to their n users, they support that network by O(n^2) and make it that much harder to dislodge in the future.
I don't think Metcalfe's law applies here - people don't use encrypted HTML video as a communication network, it's mostly a channel from content producers to users. So its value only grows linearly with the number of users that can receive it.
More importantly, though, content is more compelling than browsers, and browsers are easier to switch. If Firefox blocks its n users from receiving some content, some fraction of those will leave Firefox and get the content anyway, leaving Firefox with less strength to fight the next battle. In this case, it looks like that fraction would be pretty significant, and the impact on DRM not that great.
Option 1) Stick to your laurels and refuse to implement DRM. Other browser vendors implement DRM, certain parts of the web become inaccessible via Firefox as DRM is implemented into more and more web services (think Youtube, Vimeo, Netflix, Hulu). Firefox's lack of DRM means its users are being disadvantaged.
Option 2) Implement DRM. Accept temporary defeat, don't lose browser share to Chrome and continue fighting from within against DRM.
Which option do you think sounds more appealing to Mozilla? Die on your sword, keep the trust of your dwindling user base or implement DRM and retain most of your user base (minus the people that will leave because of this decision). I think someone needs to create a fork and build a DRM-less browser, that's the beautiful thing about open source, don't like something, change it.