From ComputerWorld: Mozilla yesterday updated Firefox to version 38, patching 15 security vulnerabilities and integrating an Adobe anti-piracy technology for playing protected media, like the movies and TV shows offered by Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.
Firefox 38's most notable enhancement -- and the one that Mozilla called out in a Tuesday blog post -- was support for digital rights management (DRM), the over-arching label for technologies that prevent people from pirating video, audio and written content.
Mozilla, like other browser makers, has been trying to dump the decades-old model of relying on third-party add-ons or plug-ins to play media. Instead, browser developers have adopted HTML5, the latest version of the Web markup language, to handle those chores, part of an effort to improve security and performance.
Trouble is, Netflix and others rely on plug-ins -- especially Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight -- to both play their content and protect it from copying.
Firefox 38 on Windows Vista and later will automatically download Adobe's Content Decryption Module (CDM), which will activate the first time a user plays DRM-protected content that calls on the module. Netflix and others have been testing DRM using Adobe's CDM for more than a year.
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