What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

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Passenger
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Joined: Wed Dec 04, 2019 4:43 pm

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

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What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened
The Register

Worth the read, but here's a teaser:
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"Big company bad" is hardly news at this point, especially if the big company is Google, but there's more going on here than that and it's worth picking apart a little.

Discontinuing a feature is rare. Part of what's amazing about the web is that you can still go to the very first web page and view it in any browser. The web is the web in large part because of this high level of backwards compatibility. To their credit, browser makers have generally been very good about making sure changes don't break the web.

That said, change happens. Most browsers don't support the blink tag anymore. Try using applet or AppCache – both are gone. That is, they're gone from the official web standard. Individual browsers may still support them, but they are no longer valid HTML. Therein lies the key. This is exactly why we have standards bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG).

These are the groups where decisions about what should and should not be part of HTML happen, and those decisions usually come after lengthy discussion and testing. The WHATWG FAQ even addresses how this process should work, calling it "a very tricky effort, involving the coordination among multiple implementations and extensive telemetry to quantify how many web pages would have their behavior changed."

Google, notorious for the amount of data it collects before making changes to its own web properties, has not, as far as we can tell, done any telemetry or have the slightest idea how many web pages would be affected by removing support for alert and dialog. Google just wants them gone so gone they are. That's a monopoly for you.

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