Firefox 49.0 Is Now Available

[SystemCrasher]

Widevine is a content protection mechanism.

Widevine is a proprietary blob plugin, therefore its not anyhow better in this sense than Flash or silverlight. Some chunk of shady proprietary code doing hell knows what stays in place. Furthermore, it conducts very questionable and treacherous activity "by design".

It has nothing to do with Flash, Silverlight or any other forward facing multimedia technology.

Sure, its just pure, crystallized evil part of multimedia technology, joining most evil parts of other techs, be it proprietary code, DRM restrictions or shady ways of doing things. Some idiots are even happy to be backdoored by some unknown company in exchange for some moving pictures. Somehow I think ppl like this are nuts.

[Tomin]

Widevine is a proprietary blob plugin, therefore its not anyhow better in this sense than Flash or silverlight. Some chunk of shady proprietary code doing hell knows what stays in place. Furthermore, it conducts very questionable and treacherous activity "by design".

Well, there is one thing that is better with Widewine than with NPAPI Flash. The Widewine plugin is run in an open source sandbox so it doesn't have full access to the system. In my mind this is somewhat better than the previous system, but certainly it's not ideal.

Anyway I wish we wouldn't need these unnecessary and counter productive protection mechanisms. They seem to often disable legit users from accessing the content and still fail to prevent unwanted copying. And this is in addition to forcing users to run proprietary software on their computers, if they want to consume that piece of content legally.

[SystemCrasher]

Well, there is one thing that is better with Widewine than with NPAPI Flash. The Widewine plugin is run in an open source sandbox so it doesn't have full access to the system. In my mind this is somewhat better than the previous system, but certainly it's not ideal.

IIRC there were some efforts to put e.g. flash in sandbox as well, etc.

Anyway I wish we wouldn't need these unnecessary and counter productive protection mechanisms. They seem to often disable legit users from accessing the content and still fail to prevent unwanted copying. And this is in addition to forcing users to run proprietary software on their computers, if they want to consume that piece of content legally

I find it shameful W3C and somesuch are padding interests of hollywood and somesuch. This approach undermines values of standards and turns standards into money-making tools, which is IMHO just wrong thing to do. So I think it is fair to admit Mozilla has miserably failed their stated mission of keeping web open. If something requires proprietary plugin it isn't open anymore and brings us back to ActiveX ages. I think Mozilla could just shut down itself. I fail to see point of their existence.

[smitty3268]

Widevine is a proprietary blob plugin, therefore its not anyhow better in this sense than Flash or silverlight. Some chunk of shady proprietary code doing hell knows what stays in place. Furthermore, it conducts very questionable and treacherous activity "by design".

It's better in that it's much smaller and more limited than what Flash could do, and therefore safer for your system. For example, it doesn't have an entire programming language and interpreter running inside it that any rogue web page could attempt to use to hijack your browser.

I get that you don't like it, and that's fair, but it doesn't make it equivalent to Flash.

[TheLexMachine]

I got Amazon Video and premium Hulu working. Netflix still gives the finger.

[unixfan2001]

I got Amazon Video and premium Hulu working. Netflix still gives the finger.

Have you tried spoofing the user agent? That seems to have helped some people.

[fuzz]

Have you tried spoofing the user agent? That seems to have helped some people.

I'm using the following user-agent (only for netflix.com) through UAControl:

Linux / Chrome 53: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.34 Safari/537.36

[heliosh]

I've asked the support when they would release Linux/Firefox support.
- "we don't support linux"