Mozilla has launched Firefox version 38, bring digital rights management to the web browser for the first time. This change currently only affects Windows Vista or later users and has not yet been brought over to the Linux or Mac OS X versions of the browser.

Mozilla has managed to stay away from DRM for some time but last year the company did state that it may be necessary in the future in order to support streaming services like Spotify of Netflix. In a company blog post last year (Via: The Inquirer),  Mozilla CTO, Andreas Gal, said that: “While we would much prefer a world and a web without DRM, our users need it to access the content they want.”

Versions of the browser running on Windows Vista or later will automatically update with the Content Decryption Module (CDM) from Adobe once a stream requires it. If you don't really care about streaming, then there will be a CDM-free version of Firefox available to download.

On top of that, you can manually uninstall the content decryption module yourself. It is a requirement for content streaming but if you don't use those services then you can safely avoid using this new DRM module.

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KitGuru Says: Obviously some form of DRM is required by streaming services like Netflix in order to try to avoid piracy. However, if you don't stream video at all in Firefox, then you don't have to install the CDM. While these services may have worked on Firefox in the past at one point or another, the likes of Netflix and Spotify could always withdraw support for a specific browser. Sky recently did just that, withdrawing Sky GO support for Google Chrome. 

Via: The Inquirer

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