Maintaining web standards without breaking backwards compatibility is literally what they signed up for when they decided to make a browser. If they didn't want to do that job, they shouldn't have made one.
It is remarkable the anti-trust case went as it did.
Chromium is open source and free (both as in beer and speech). The license says they've made no future commitments and made no warrants.
Google signed up to give something away for free to people who want to use it. From the very first version, it wasn't perfectly compatible with other web browsers (which mostly did IE quirks things). If you don't want to use it, because it doesn't maintain enough backwards compatibility... Then don't.
iIRC, lack of IE compatibility is fundamentally different, because the IE specific stuff they didn't implement was never part of the open web standards, but rather stuff Microsoft unilaterally chose to add.
Literally this. Microsoft used to ship a free web browser. Then they stopped. That's not something anybody can object to.
> because the IE specific stuff they didn't implement was never part of the open web standards, but rather stuff Microsoft unilaterally chose to add.
Standards aren't holy books. It's actually more important to support real customer use cases than to follow standards.
But you know this. If standards are more important that real use cases, then the fact that XSLT has been removed from the html5 standard is enough justification to remove it from Chrome.
There is a fundamental difference between ceasing to make a browser and continuing to make a browser, while not meeting your expectations as a browser maker.
> If standards are more important that real use cases, then the fact that XSLT has been removed from the html5 standard is enough justification to remove it from Chrome.
Browsers very much have not depreciated support for non-HTML5 markup (e.g. the HTML4 era <center> tag still works). This is because upholding devs and users expectation that standards compliant websites that once worked will continue to work is important.
What odds would you put dropping XSLT support at for triggering a user migration?