Spotify web player, working w/o Widevine enabled on Win10

[lukemulks]

• Did you search for similar issues before submitting this one?

Yes - see related issues below.

• Describe the issue you encountered:

On the Spotify.com site, I'm receiving Widevine prompts on every page I navigate to.

With Widevine disabled, I'm able to use the Spotify web player w/o issue.

Not sure if Widevine is required for macOS, and if what I'm experiencing on Windows is different than current behavior on macOS.

• Platform (Win7, 8, 10? macOS? Linux distro?):

win10

• Brave Version (revision SHA):

  Brave: 0.15.1 
  rev: ea5024d1f3e47d34de79b70e3cd74f1408c985ce 
  Muon: 2.58.8 
  libchromiumcontent: 58.0.3029.81 
  V8: 5.8.283.32 
  Node.js: 7.9.0 
  Update Channel: dev 
  os.platform: win32 
  os.release: 10.0.14393 
  os.arch: x64

• Steps to reproduce:

  1. Go to spotify.com
  2. Get the Widevine prompt.
  3. Do not enable widevine.
  4. Go to the Spotify web player. https://open.spotify.com/browse/featured?utm_campaign=redirect.webplayerlink&utm_content=3b49d6eebbb2d0a9b7fd5736887fbfb2&utm_medium=www_footer&utm_source=www.spotify.com
  5. Sign into Spotify
  6. Continue to select Cancel on widevine prompts. 7 Play without enabling widevine.

• Actual result: Spotify web player works w/o widevine.

• Will the steps above reproduce in a fresh profile? If not what other info can be added?

Yes

• Is this an issue in the currently released version?

Yes

• Can this issue be consistently reproduced?

Yes

There are a few reasons I'm opening this issue:

• If we have users that don't want to install the desktop app, and then come to the web player, they're getting a DRM prompt. If it's not necessary to enable DRM to use the player, it would be nice to remove a "black box" from the equation if we don't need it there.

• If we don't need Widevine for the web player, if we can remove the need to enable it, it might be a win for users that care about DRM black-boxing things.

• The Widevine prompts show up on every page I navigate to at spotify.com (pages that aren't the web player). It can be frustrating to get prompted so many times for something that isn't required.

Prompted on the first spotify page.

Prompted on the second spotify page.

Prompted with the web player.

Web player successfully plays on Windows w/o Widevine enabled.

• Any related issues: Again, may be a Windows-only thing, based on what I'm seeing reported elsewhere (this user was on macOS):

https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/6881

cc: @alexwykoff for visibility

[lembitk]

Confirming this still occurs on Win 10 x64 with Brave v0.23.19 – on Spotify.com Brave displays Widevine prompts and yet Spotify web player works just fine w/o Widevine enabled. It is wrong to nag the user about something that isn't required and mislead him into enabling Widevine unnecessarily.

Brave: 0.23.19 
V8: 6.7.288.46 
rev: 178c3fbc045a0cbdbe098db08307503cce952081 
Muon: 7.1.3 
OS Release: 10.0.17134 
Update Channel: Release 
OS Architecture: x64 
OS Platform: Microsoft Windows 
Node.js: 7.9.0 
Tor: 0.3.3.7 (git-035a35178c92da94) 
Brave Sync: v1.4.2 
libchromiumcontent: 67.0.3396.87