I use Firefox. If I’m on the web and a site does not work with Firefox, I leave that site.
Do they think somehow people like me will change our minds? And more to the point, do they think website authors will want to limit their own audience for the benefit of some company?
Unless I’m misunderstanding this, maybe I need an ELI5
Will you change your bank when it refuses to work with Firefox? What if most other banks do the same?
This is how things are in Android now – online banking, online games and even subscription media services are mostly unavailable to those who would like to use non-official OS.
website authors will want to limit their own audience for the benefit of some company?
Many websites already refuse to work with anything not-chrome-based – so website authors often don’t care.
Banks see that as ‘security’, so they are ok with ‘losing’ a small percentage of customers who want ‘insecure’ devices. In fact they would hardly lose anything, as their customers usually depend more on the bank, than the bank on any particular customer.
For media providers, that is another ‘anti-piracy’ measure (DRM) – they will also happily sacrifice Linux users, as insignificant fraction of users, probably less then ‘actual pirates’ on Windows or Mac. Netflix already won’t stream in high quality to Firefox on Linux.
For online game providers this will be easy anti-cheat measure – they will also not care about that insignificant fraction of user.
Each of those service providers would loose maybe 5% of their user base (probably less… as most users would eventually accommodate), but the affected users would use major number of services they care about.
People like you and me are unfortunately a small minority. Most people go along with it, so they set about steamrolling over us through coercion or just not doing business with us
Apple sold this feature as an alternative to captchas.
In order to sign up for Lemmy, I had to pass a captcha check to prove I’m human. Now that bots can trivially be better than any human at captchas we have to find something else. Is attestation a good option? We can debate that, but it’s definitely on the table. And I expect Firefox will implement it (even if only via a plugin) if it becomes widely adopted.
Can someone eli5 “shipped attestation”?
- Alice gives Bob a Secret Note.
- Alice and Bob agree on a way for Bob to scramble the Secret Note so that Alice can unscramble it.
- Bob scrambles the Secret Note.
- Bob gives Carol the Scrambled Secret Note.
- Carol gives Alice the Scrambled Secret Note.
- Alice descrambles the Scrambled Secret Note.
- Alice tells Carol the Secret Note came from Bob.
Now, Carol trusts Alice and Alice trusts Bob. By passing this note around, Carol can trust Bob since Alice trusts Bob and she trusts Alice.
Passing the note around tells Carol (Web Server) that Bob (Web Browser) has trust from Alice (Attestation Server) and is not some imposter just claiming to be Bob.