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Comment by ablob | Hacker News Reader

"Steering for more simplicity" would be a political decision. Keeping it is also a political decision.

Removing a feature that is used, while possibly making chrome more "simple", also forces all the users of that feature to react to it, lest their efforts are lost to incompatibility. There is no way this can not be a political decision, given that either way one side will have to cope with the downsides of whatever is (or isn't) done.

PS: I don't know how much the feature is actually used, but my rationale should apply to any X where X is a feature considered to be pruned.

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No, the idea is that "political decision" is used in opposition to a decision based on rational tradeoffs.

If there isn't enough usage of a feature to justify prioritizing engineering hours to it instead of other features, so it's removed, that's just a regular business-as-usual decision. Nothing "political" about it. It's straightforward cost-benefit.

However, if the decision is based on factors beyond simple cost-benefit -- maintaining or removing a feature because it makes some influential group happy, because it's part of a larger strategic plan to help or harm something else, then we call that a political decision.

That's how the term "political decision" in this kind of context is used, what it means.

> If there isn't enough usage of a feature to justify prioritizing engineering hours to it instead of other features, so it's removed, that's just a regular business-as-usual decision. Nothing "political" about it. It's straightforward cost-benefit.

Then why is Google actively shoving multiple hardware APIs into the browser (against the objection of other vendors) if their usage is 10x less than that of XSLT?

They have no trouble finding the resource to develop and maintain those

You have to keep developing new things to see what proves useful in the long-run.

When you have something that's been around for a long time and still shows virtually no usage, it's fine to pull the plug. It's a kind of evolution. You can kill things that are proven to be unpopular, while building things and giving them the time to see if they become popular.

That's what product feature iteration is.

WebSerial and WebUSB are the best thing to happen to browsers since sliced bread. Just because you can't see why it's amazing that users won't need to give some random, badly supported driver SYSTEM/root privileges to run their specialized hardware -- encompassing hobbyist, educational and professional uses -- doesn't mean it's not obviously useful, and Mozilla's stance on keeping it out of Firefox will just harm their market share in these area -- education probably being the most hurtful.

From what I gather here, XSLT's functionality OTOH is easily replaced, and unlike the useful hardware support you're raging against, is a behemoth to support.

I would argue that FTP and Gopher were far more broadly used in browsers than XSLT ever was... but they still removed them. They also likely didn't present nearly the burden of support for XSLT either.

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