I think it's the other way around. Simply raising awareness about endangered animals may be enough to gain traction since many/most people are naturally sympathetic about it. Conversely, XSLT being deprecated has lower awareness initially, but when you raise it many people hearing that aren't necessarily sympathetic - I don't think most engineers think particularly fondly about XSLT, my reaction to it being deprecated is basically "good riddance, I didn't think anyone was really using it in browsers anyway".
As an open source developer, i also have a lot of sympathy to google in this situation. Having a legacy feature holding the entire project back despite almost nobody using it because the tiny fracation that do are very vocal and think its fine to be abusive to developers to get what they want despite the fact its free software they didn't pay a dime for, is something i think a lot of open source devs can sympathize with.
I think all that you say applies to a random open source project done by volunteer developers, but really doesn't in case of Google.
Google has used its weight to build a technically better product, won the market, and are now driving the whole web platform forward the way they like it.
This has nothing to do with the cost of maintaining the browser for them.
It seems likely to me that it is about the 'cost' - not literally monetary cost but one or two engineers periodically have to wrangle libxslt for Chrome and they think it's a pain in the ass and not widely used, and are now responding by saying "What if I didn't have to deal with this any more".
I'm not sure what else it would be about - I don't see why they would especially care about removing XSLT support if cost isn't a factor.
Google is still made up of people, who work a finite amount of hours in a day, and maybe have other things they want to spend their time on then maintaining legacy cruft.
There is this weird idea that wealthy people & corporations arent like the rest of us, and no rules apply to them. And to a certain extent its true that things are different if you have that type of wealth. But at the end of the day, everyone is still human, and the same restrictions still generally apply. At most they are just pushed a little further out.
My comment is not about that at all: it's a response to claim how Google SW engineering team is feeling the heat just like any other free software project, and thus we should be sympathetic to them?
I am sure they've got good reasons they want to do this: them having the same problems as an unstaffed open source project getting vocal user requests is not one of them.
>I think it's the other way around. Simply raising awareness about endangered animals may be enough to gain traction since many/most people are naturally sympathetic about it.
You're completely right in your literal point quoted above, but note what I was emphasizing. In this example, "save the animals" was offered as an example of a problem oversaturated in awareness to a point of diminishing returns. If you don't think animal welfare illustrates that particular idea, insert whatever your preferred example is. Free tibet, stop diamond trade, don't eat too much sodium, Nico Harrison shouldn't be a GM in NBA basketball, etc.
I think everyone on all sides agrees with these messages and agrees that there's value in broadcasting them up to a point, but then it becomes not an issue of awareness but willpower of relevant actors.
You also may well be right that developers would react negatively, honestly I'm not sure. But the point here was supposed to be that this pages author wasn't making the mistake of strategic misunderstanding on the point of oversaturating an audience with a message. Though perhaps they made the mistake in thinking they would reach a sympathetic audience.
