looks like rendering adblockers extensions obsolete with manifest-v3 was not enough so now they try to implement DRM into the browser giving the ability to any website to refuse traffic to you if you don’t run a complaint browser ( cough…firefox )
here is an article in hacker news since i’m sure they can explain this to you better than i.
and also some github docs
Guess why I don’t use the Chrome ecosystem and don’t depend on Google.
Unfortunately, you don’t have much of a choice. If a lot of websites start using this implementation, Firefox will have no choice but to implement this, otherwise a lot of websites will be broken.
I have a choice of not using these sites nor enabling antifeatures like DRM support in Firefox now or likely its libre future forks.
Sticking to free/libre has been good to me in the last 30 years. I don’t intend to change that.
The solution is not using crappy things. As simple as that.
We’re the minority, if this gets implemented it’s endgame. Try convincing the billions of people who already don’t care enough to use Firefox to protect their privacy to now stop using Chrome because it’s killing the open web. Now tell them to stop using services they care about because DRM is bad.
At this point our only real hope is the EU decides to forcibly stop this, but I’m not holding my breath.
It’s endgame for old WWW. Well, maybe Gemini will have its market glory moment, though commercialization is explicitly what its creators and users don’t want.
What is Gemini in this context?
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
This is neat, but this decidedly a niche product with very limited application. I’m an old hat and I can’t see the inherent value proposition in this, why is this better than static pages with hyperlinks? That doesn’t and frankly shouldn’t require a whole new protocol and client. That’s what HTTP and HTML were originally built for.
Because HTTP and HTML are already stretched out to be broken resulting in the internet you know. Gemini protocol, on the other hand, starts from scratch with the idea to be limited by design on what it can possibly do, so as to remove the most common commercial enshittification cases as early as possible.