this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Google (The company behind Chrome) wants to create a type of DRM for web pages. Google claims that this will help with things like bot traffic, spam, etc.
Mozilla (The company behind firefox) is opposed to creating this DRM because it has no benefit to the end user and is likely to be harmful to the openness of the internet.
Not just chrome, but also the lead contributor to chromium (the underlying system in Edge, Brave, etc.)
But does Mozilla's opposition have any final say in the thing getting implemented in the standard?
Not a final say, but it have some influence on the public discussion.
Somewhat. Webstandards are voted upon, and I believe Mozilla is part of those organizations.
However Google could always choose to ignore web standards and do what they want. And due to their massive market dominance this would effectively enforce this overnight for over half of the internet.
The reason they may not, is the EU would take them to court over that. The US no longer believes in stopping companies from ruining shit though.
The only real benefit to users that I can think of is that it could eliminate the need for captchas.
It really wouldn't
If the point is so websites can trust that you’re a person then the captchas aren’t needed.
But how can it trust you’re a person when it just confirms that you’re running an in-modified site. It takes a hash of the site, then make sure your local view of the website matches that hash.
This disables add blockers, custom css, etc; but I don’t see how this standard would prevent bots…
It's not just checking that you're running in an un-modified OS, that's just one part of it.
It doesn't disable ad-blockers or custom css btw. And anyway, websites can already detect when you're using an ad-blocker and not show you their content. This isn't needed for that.
I don't even trust that I'm a person sometimes.