Having flashbacks of “<!--[if IE 6]> <script src="fix-ie6.js"></script> <![endif]-->”
Their board syphons the little money that is left out of their "foundation + corporation" combo, and they keep cutting people from Firefox dev team every year. Of course they don't want to maintain pieces of web standards if it means extra million for their board members.
I'm convinced Mozilla is purposefully engineered to be rudderless: C-suite draw down huge salaries, approve dumb, mission-orthgonal objectives, in order to keep Mozilla itself impotent in ever threatening Google.
Mozilla is Google's antitrust litigation sponge. But it's also kept dumb and obedient. Google would never want Mozilla to actually be a threat.
If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust. It would have synergized with their core web mission. Those people have since been let go.
WhatWG is focused on maintaining specs that browsers intend to implement and maintain. When Chrome, Firefox, and Safari agree to remove XSLT that effectively decides for WhatWG's removal of the spec.
I wouldn't put too much weight behind who originally proposed the removal. It's a pretty small world when it comes to web specifications, the discussions likely started between vendors before one decided to propose it.
HN has historically been relatively free of such dogma, but it seems times are changing, even here
Mozilla…are they actually competing? Like really and truly.
1. Google has engaged in a lot of anticompetitive behavior to maintain and extend their web monopoly.
2. Removing XSLT support from browsers is a good idea that is widely supported by all major browser vendors.
Safari is what I'm concerned about. Without Apple's monopoly control, Safari is guaranteed to be a dead engine. WebKit isn't well-enough supported on Linux and Windows to compete against Blink and Gecko, which suggests that Safari is the most expendable engine of the three.
HN still has less dogma than Reddit, but it's closer than it used to be in my estimation. Reddit is still getting more dogma each day, but HN is slowly catching up.
I don't know where to turn to for online discourse that is at least mostly free from dogma these days. This used to be it.
That seems to fail occam's razor pretty hard, given the competing hypotheses for each of their decisions include "Mozilla staff think they're doing a smart thing but they're wrong" and "Mozilla staff are doing a smart thing, it's just not what you would have done".
Users and web developers seemed much less on board though[1][2], enough that Google referenced that in their announcement.
[1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578 [2] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523
The first sentence isn't wrong, but the last sentence is confused in the same way that people who assume that Wikimedia employees have been largely responsible for the content on Wikipedia are confused about how stuff actually makes it into Wikipedia. In reality, WMF's biggest contribution is providing infrastructure costs and paying engineers to develop the Mediawiki platform that Wikipedia uses.
Likewise, a bunch of the people who built up MDN weren't and never could be "let go", because they were never employed by Mozilla to work on MDN to begin with.
(There's another problem, too, which is that addition to selling short a lot of people who are responsible for making MDN as useful as it is but never got paid for it, it presupposes that those who were being paid to work on MDN shouldn't have been let go.)
> google has been the party leading the charge arguing for the removal.
and
> many here seem to think that was largely driven by google though that's speculation
I'm saying that I don't see any evidence that this was "driven by google". All the evidence I see is that Google, Mozilla, and Apple were all pretty immediately in agreement that removing XSLT was the move they all wanted to make.
You're telling us that we shouldn't think too hard about the fact that a Mozilla staffer opened the request for removal, and that we should notice that Google "led the charge". It would be interesting if somebody could back that up with something besides vibes, because I don't even see how there was a charge to lead. Among the groups that agreed, that agreement appears to have been quick and unanimous.
> People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil.
Sure, but a person also needs to be conscious of the role that this perception plays in securing premature dismissal of anyone who ventures to criticize.
(In quoting your comment above, I've deliberately separated the first sentence from the second. Notice how easily the observation of the phenomenon described in the second sentence can be used to undergird the first claim, even though the first claim doesn't actually follow as a necessary consequence from the second.)
Google does lead the charge on it, immediately having a PR to remove it from Chromium and stating intent to remove even though the guy pushing it didn't even know about XSLT uses before he even opened either of them.
XSLT is a symptom of how browser vendors approach the web these days. And yes, Google are the worst of them.
I am sharing my view, though, that Google engineers have been the majority share of browser engineer comments I've seen arguing for removing XSLT.
Honestly the one thing I don’t begrudge them is taking Google’s money to make them the default search engine. That’s a very easy deal with the devil to make especially because it’s so trivial to change your default search engine which I imagine a large percentage of Firefox users do with glee. But what they have focused on over the last couple of years has been very strange to watch.
I know Proton gets mixed feelings around here, but to me it’s always seemed like Proton and Mozilla should be more coordinated. Feel like they could do a lot of interesting things together