The inclusion of Adobe’s DRM in Firefox means that Mozilla will be putting millions of its users in a position where they are running code whose bugs are illegal to report. So it’s very important that this code be as isolated as possible.
By open-sourcing the sandbox that limits the Adobe software’s access to the system, Mozilla is making it auditable and verifiable. This is a much better deal than users will get out of any of the rival browsers, like Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer, and it is a meaningful and substantial difference.
Seems to me that Mozilla and Adobe may even be able to pull off a tech solution that concurrently guarantees user privacy rights and content owners entitlements.
Even if they did – and it may very well turn out to be an impossible task – it wouldn’t matter significantly to users’ privacy, because most software and firmware stacks below Firefox keep on being 10 or 100 times larger than what is affordably verifiable, and most firmware and physical hardware on commercial devices are not even verifiable.
Our project User Verified Social Telematics aims to do exactly that, with world class partners.