A majority of websites doesn't use the EME DRM. It's Netflix and some other streaming portals. Any Chrome fork would work with almost all web sites beyond those few.<p>And with the new edge, there even will be a Chrome fork that supports EME DRM as well, and most likely it will support higher resolutions than Chrome itself as it's using OS built in DRM mechanisms that the studios love.<p>DRM is not the source of Google's control over Chrome. They use a different mechanism: manpower. They have an insane amount of developers working on Chrome, constantly changing it. Any smaller project forking Chrome and changing some major part won't be able to keep up with the changes unless they upstream. And ultimately, Google employees have control over what gets upstreamed and which contribution gets rejected.
I think the blame needs to be directed at the video streaming companies, not at Google. Can you go to Netflix and just download a .mp4 of their latest show? Nope. That's on them, not Google. If Netflix cared about a cross-browser experience or open standards, the tools are available to them.<p>With that in mind, they should really hire someone that has access to Usenet or a private Bittorrent tracker. All of Netflix's shows are available for free in 4k there. Google sold them DRM that doesn't actually work. Netflix paid their employees millions of dollars to have meetings and develop code to work with the idea in mind that Google's magic beans would save their content from piracy. It didn't work, though.<p>You should be mad at Netflix. Netflix should be mad at Google. But everyone just carries on like everything is great. It's weird.
Google's massive browser market share has opened the door to some ugly things. I can't help but shake my head whenever I come across a "Chrome only" SaaS startup.
I may have the minority opinion here, but I don’t even think DRM should be in web browsers, rather, use vendor provided apps to consume Netflix, Google Play Movies, Hulu, etc.<p>On mobile, I prefer using web versions of services and not using apps. I make an exception when consuming content that I pay for.<p>The web should be free and unencumbered.
Always surprised how few people realize this. Yes, on a random OS with no binary builds by Google I can have the Chromium browser. It does not have the ability to watch Netflix, though. To get that you need to run a Linux binary chrome in a Linux API translator.
The other large binary blob in the non-opensource builds, apart from DRM, is the wifi network detection module.<p>It will look at what wifi networks are close to you, and Google finds out your physical location that way without your computer having a GPS chip or a cellphone network chip (Google has the full database of the center of gravity for every wifi network from the streetview cars, so the information of which network is how strong for your computer allows location by something like +- 10 meters).
Although it's limited, there is still a chance of competition. This prevents pure open source browsers, but it doesn't prevent a large software company from forking Chromium and adding DRM themselves (as Microsoft is doing).