Last week I shipped an update to my Chrome extension which added an additional required permission. Here’s what the permission requests access for: Change your settings that control websites’ access to features such as cookies, JavaScript, plugins, geolocation, microphone, camera etc. When the extension auto-updates with the newly required permissions, Chrome disables the extension and prompts the user to approve these new permissions. Because of this, my extension lost 50,000 users over a few days.

In 2017, the body responsible for standardizing web browser technologies, W3C, introduced Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—thus bringing with it the end of competitive indie web browsers. No longer is it possible to build your own web browser capable of consuming some of the most popular content on the web. Websites like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and others require copyright content protection which is only accessible through browser vendors who have license agreements with large corporations.

After 4 months of waiting, that is the response I got from Widevine, Google’s DRM for web browsers, regarding a license agreement. For the last 2 years I’ve been working on a web browser that now cannot be completed because Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome, won’t allow DRM in an open source project. The browser I’m building, called Metastream, is an Electron-based (Chromium derived), MIT-licensed browser hosted on GitHub.