> Remind me what was Google's profit last year?
Last i checked, google isn't a charity.
Last i checked, google isn't a charity.
Last I checked, Google isn't supposed to be able to unilaterally decide how the World Wide Web is supposed to work
Besides, xkcd #2347 [1] is talking about precisely that situation - there is a shitload of very small FOSS libraries that underpin everything and yet, funding from the big dogs for whom even ten fulltime developer salaries would be a sneeze has historically lacked hard.
Google does contribute to software that it uses. When i say google is not a charity, i mean why would they continue to use a library that is not useful to them, just so they can have an excuse to contribute to it? It makes very little sense.
An awful lot of stuff depends on xslt under the hood. Web frontend, maybe not much any more, that ship has long since sailed. But anything Java? Anything XML-SOAP? That kind of stuff breathes XML and XSLT. And, at least MS Office's new-generation file formats are XML... and I'm pretty sure OpenOffice is just the same.
I'd also assume the java world is using xalan-j or saxon, not libxslt.
Neither do huge complicated standards that Chrome pushed in recent years.
> that is why google is removing it instead of fixing it.
And yet Google has no issues supporting, deploying and fixing features that see 10x less usage. Also, see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45874740
> i mean why would they continue to use a library that is not useful to them, just so they can have an excuse to contribute to it? It makes very little sense.
They took upon themselves the role of benevolent stewards of the web. According to their own principles they should exercise extreme care when adding or removing features to the web.
However, since they dominate the browser market, and have completely subsumed all web-related committees, they have turned into arrogant uncaring dictators.
Apple and firefox agree with them. They did not do this unilaterally. By sone accounts it was actually firefox originally pushing for this.
The main guy pushing it didn't even know RSS sites as used by podcasts until after people flooded the issue with examples and requests not to remove. E.g. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315...
[1] Reaction was "cautiously agree" btw. In that same issue, https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-314... and https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-314...
[2] Same as with alert/prompt. While all browsers would want to remove them, Chrome not only immediately decided to remove them with very short notice, but literally refused to even engage with people pointing out issues until a very large public outcry: https://gomakethings.com/google-vs.-the-web/#the-chrome-team...
There's a difference between "we agree on principle" and "we don't care, remove/ship/change YOLO"