Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO, on EME and DRM

A few weeks back, I wrote about the troubling prospect of DRM being baked into HTML5. At the centre of a related piece was a post by Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering for Mozilla. As I noted then, it was somewhat opaque, in that I found it hard to understand how exactly Mozilla intended to react to the W3C's pernicious proposal to discuss DRM - specifically, the idea of adding Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5. By a happy chance, Eich was passing through London recently, and so I was able to find out more about Mozilla's attitude and plans in this area.

 On Open Enterprise blog.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the troubling prospect of DRM being baked into HTML5. At the centre of a related piece was a post by Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering for Mozilla. As I noted then, it was somewhat opaque, in that I found it hard to understand how exactly Mozilla intended to react to the W3C's pernicious proposal to discuss DRM - specifically, the idea of adding Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5. By a happy chance, Eich was passing through London recently, and so I was able to find out more about Mozilla's attitude and plans in this area. - See more at: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/11/brendan-eich-mozillas-cto-on-eme-and-drm/index.htm#sthash.bJs9GIQu.dpuf

Is Mozilla on the Bridge of Khazad - or on the Fence?

Last week I explored at some length the curious reasons that Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave for supporting the proposal to add hooks for DRM into HTML5. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Meeting Mr Firefox: Johnathan Nightingale

Mozilla and its central Firefox project are themes that I have returned to often on this blog. That's not so surprising: Mozilla is one of the oldest free software projects, starting back in 1998 when Netscape stunned the world by announcing that it would open up its key product, Netscape Navigator. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mozilla and the Open Source Browser Bonanza

Even if you don't remember the birth of Mozilla 15 years ago, you are certainly benefitting from its consequences. For, back then, the company that invented the Web as a mass medium, Netscape, was in its death throes, and looked likely to take Web browser choice with it.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mozilla to the Rescue, Again?

I've written a number of posts about Mozilla's rise and fall and rise: how it went from saving the open Web and open standards in the face of the stagnation brought about by Internet Explorer 6's long dominance; to losing its way somewhat, with the upstart Chrome threatening to supplant its role as the "other" browser; and finally finding a role once more as it concentrated on what it called Web apps.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mozilla Helped To Stop SOPA In January, Now It's Worried About WCIT

Mike wrote how both Vint Cerf and Sir Tim Berners-Lee were concerned about the outcome of the WCIT talks currently taking place in Dubai. Those aren't the only important voices being raised. Here, for example, is the Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox browser and many other free software projects: 

On Techdirt.

Mozilla's Big Comeback

Mozilla is now something of a venerable institution in the open source world - the first release of browser code by Netscape took place back in 1998. Even Firefox is eight years old, which seems pretty incredible.

On Open Enterprise blog.

What a Wonderful Piece of Work is Opus

When we talk of free software, we typically think of things like GNU/Linux, Apache or Firefox. But one aspect that often gets overlooked is that of multimedia codecs. There's a good reason for this: most of them are patent-encumbered, which makes using them with free software hard - well, hard if you want to do it legally. In practice, most people have employed implementations of dubious legality, and the licensors have taken the sensible view that they are hardly losing millions from this kind of activity, and have turned a blind eye.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Can open source be democratic?

One of the most important messages in the history of free software – and computing – was posted 21 years ago, on 25 August 1991:

On The H Open.

Why is Firefox - and Open Source - a Disaster in China?

Like many people, I've been tracking the steady ascent of Google Chrome - and corresponding decline of Microsoft's Internet Explorer - for some time now. Just recently, yet another milestone has been reached, apparently:

On Open Enterprise blog.

What should free software do in 2012?

In my last column, I suggested that one of the best things that Mozilla could do in order to promote the Open Web and openness in general would be to support the battle for online freedom in more general ways. That's something it has already started doing, notably in trying to halt the passage of the awful Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that is currently grinding through the US legislative process.

On The H Open.

What Should Mozilla Do?

There has been a flurry of excitement about Mozilla recently. Not, as you might hope, about the latest version of Firefox; one of the unintended consequences of the rapid release approach currently adopted is that nobody really gets excited about the constant flow of new versions, which is a pity.

On The H Open.

Mozilla's Brendan Eich on the Birth of Firefox

A couple of weeks ago I posted the first part of an interview with Brendan Eich, who is Mozilla's CTO. That covered the early years of browsers at Netscape, and the origin of Mozilla. Somewhat belatedly, here's the second part of that interview, which picks up the story at the beginning of this millennium, and reveals the complex sequence of events that led to the creation of Mozilla Firefox.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mozilla's Next Firefox Moment?

Last year, there was a lot of handwringing about Firefox's continuing loss of market share. This was only by relatively small amounts, but people wondered whether Firefox had peaked and was in trouble.

On The H Open.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of HTML

HTML began life as a clever hack of a pre-existing approach. As Tim Berners-Lee explains in his book, “Weaving the Web”:

Since I knew it would be difficult to encourage the whole world to use a new global information system, I wanted to bring on board every group I could. There was a family of markup languages, the standard generalised markup language (SGML), already preferred by some of the world's top documentation community and at the time considered the only potential document standard among the hypertext community. I developed HTML to look like a member of that family.

On The H Open.

Why We Need Firefox

Earlier this week, I reported on my travails with Firefox, and how I teetered on the brink of switching to Google's Chromium. Actually, I wasn't too seriously tempted, and thanks to the kind efforts of Mozilla, the problem has been resolved (see Update at the end of the above post for details.)

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Day I Nearly Dumped Firefox

I remember well the moment when the beta version of Netscape Navigator 0.9 was released in October 1994. It was so clearly superior to the main Mosaic browser I was running at the time, that there was no question about using anything else thereafter.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mozilla Moves On

Back in August last year, I wrote the following:

we no longer live in a simple binary world of Internet Explorer as the dominant player and Firefox as the doughty but distant challenger. We are entering a new situation with three powerful players all striving to impress users with their respective strengths and capabilities, each sometimes gaining, sometimes losing a little market share.

In this sense, Mozilla has won, because this kind of healthy competition was precisely what it was trying to achieve when it launched its open source browser project over a decade ago. It has also won in the sense that Internet Explorer is now much more compliant with open Web standards, and seems unlikely to try to lock down the Internet again with its own proprietary add-ons as it did successfully during the dotcom boom. As a result, it's probably fair to say that with its relatively static market share, what we are seeing is not so much the beginning of the end for Firefox, just the end of the beginning where it was the plucky underdog able to ride an easy wave of browser rebellion.

But if this is the end of the beginning, what comes next?

On Open Enterprise blog.

2011: The Year of Firefox - or of Chrome?

Everyone knows that there are lies, damned lies and Web analytics, but the latter can at least give a feel for what's going on. And the latest figures for browser market share in Europe certainly do that.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft: Hoist by its Own Petard

I always look forward to reading Microsoft-funded research, because over the years it's evolved into a kind of game. The results - of course - are always amazingly good for Microsoft, but hidden away in there, like a secret at the heart of a complex puzzle, there's something that we're not supposed to notice that undermines the final result.

On Open Enterprise blog.