The issue is you can’t say to put little weight who originally proposed the removal if the other poster is putting all the weight on Google, who didn’t even initially propose it

Mozilla's board are basically Google yes-people.

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.

I guess you mean except Mozilla and Safari...which are the two other competing browser engines? It's not like a it's a room full of Chromium based browsers.

Completely agree. You see this all the time in online discourse. I call it the "two things can be true at the same time" problem, where a lot of people seem unable to believe that 2 things can simultaneously be true, in this case:

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.

Maybe free of the "evil Google" dogma but not free from dogma. The few who dared to express one tenth of the disapproval what we usually express about Apple nowadays were downvoted to transparent ink in a matter of minutes. Microsoft had its honeymoon period with HN after their pro open source campaign, WSL, VSCode etc. People who prudently remembered the Microsoft of the 90s and the 2000s did get their fair share of downvotes. Then Windows 11 happened. Surprise. Actually I thought that there has been a consensus about Google being evil for at least ten years but I might me wrong.

> It's just ill-informed ideological thinking.

> 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.)

Safari is "cautiously supportive", waiting for someone else to remove support.

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 think you're reading way too much into that. For one thing, that's a proposal for Javascript, whose controlling body is TC39. For another, this was a bog standard example of a draft proposal where a bug was discovered, and rollout was adjusted. If that's having a "servant-oriented mindset", so do 99% of software projects.

It feels like maybe the disconnect here is with what "servant" means, and with this quote: "the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)".

The RFC8890 doesn't suggest anything that overlaps with my understanding of what the word "servant" means or implies. The library in my town endeavors to make decisions that promote the knowledge and education of people in my town. But I wouldn't characterize them as having a "servant-mindset". Maybe the person above meant "service"?

FWIW, Google/Mozilla/Apple appear to believe they're making the correct decision for the benefit of end users, by removing code that is infrequently used, unmaintained, and thus primarily a security risk for the majority of their users.

I put this in a parallel thread, but maybe this is a linguistic gap between "servant", a person who does what they are told and has very limited agency within the bounds of their instructions, and "service", where you do things for the benefit of another entity.

None of the above reads like a "servant-oriented mindset". It reads like "this is the framework by which we decide what's valuable". And by that framework, they're saying that keeping XSLT around is not the right call. You can disagree with that, but nothing you've quoted suggests that they're trying to prioritize any group over the majority of their users.

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

1. As we're seeing here, browser developers determine what content the browser will parse and process. This happens in both directions: tons of what is now common JS/CSS shipped first as browser-specific behavior that was then standardized, and also browsers have dropped support for gopher, for SSLv2, and Flash, among other things.

2. Browsers often explicitly provide a transformation point where users can modify content. Ad blockers work specifically because the browser is not a "servant" of whatever the server returns.

3. Plenty of content can be hosted on servers but not understood or rendered by browsers. I joked about Opera elsewhere on the thread, which notably included a torrent client, but Chrome/Firefox/Safari did not: torrent files served by the server weren't run in those browsers.

There have been plenty of browsers that were not part of a big company, either for part or all of their history. They don't tend to have massive market share, in part because browsers are amazingly complex and when they break, users get pissed because their browsing is affected.

Even the browsers created by individuals or small groups don't have, as far as I've ever seen, a "servant-oriented mindset": like all software projects, they are ultimately developed and supported at the discretion of their developer(s).

This is how you get interesting quirks like Opera including torrent support natively, or Brave bundling its own advertising/cryptocurrency thing.

I don't remember it this way. It was my understanding that browsers were designed to browse servers and that servers, or websites designed themselves around web standards that were initiated by specs made part of browsing experience that web browsers created.

> Chromium commits are controlled by a pool of Google developers, so it's not open in the sense that anyone can contribute or steer the direction of the project.

By these criteria no software is open source.

That’s not an accurate statement. The web was not just the protocols. It was the protocols and the servers that served them and the browsers that supported them and the web sites that were built with them. There is no web without browsers just like there is no web without websites.

Most of the protocol specs were written retroactively to match functionality that browsers were already using in the wild.