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Chrome still displays bitmap images. (S)FTP is still used, there's a lot of legacy stuff on the internet, and Google does not dictate what technology people use

Chrome still displays bitmap images. (S)FTP is still used, there's a lot of legacy stuff on the internet, and Google does not dictate what technology people use. It's still a web browser after all, not an Instagram viewer. > It's not part of the modern web, so it's just another loose end to tie up. While I see that it is shared by many here, I do not get this sentiment. It's still out there and rarely used, yes. But similarly would not require much maintenance for the time being, remove it when users decide it's dead, not just your shiny modern partners. The codebase cannot be that burdened by support for the protocol, why even take action? I guess what I'm trying to figure out is the reason why this even came up, is that to soothe some weird code base / maintenance metric?

UncleMeat 7y ago
Are you sure it wouldn't require much maintenance? "We have to support this other weird crap that nobody uses anymore" is like pain point #1 for nontrivial surgery.
- tastroder 7y ago
  I could not honestly judge that since I'm not familiar with the code base / project leadership at all. Given the project's reach I'd figure they have that part of the code thoroughly covered by tests and well enough separated to keep maintenance efforts on the low burner. The linked Google Doc says that usage in a 28-day window was at 0.01-0.03% of users (not sure which figure to use there). Sure, that sounds horrid at first but think about how many users Chrome has, that's not nothing either. Instead of implementing encrypted connections to make their software better, they jump to deprecate yet another protocol. I just find this really hard to grok. How many people used the profiling features of the developer tools in that time frame for example? Not many? That's cool, do we get to keep those anyway? Browsers are complex, yes, it just would be nice if we could expect a bit more of a graceful deprecation process with better communication. If you don't feel like supporting it, move it to an extension/plugin to separate it and put it somewhere the community can pick it up easily.

UncleMeat 7y ago

Are you sure it wouldn't require much maintenance? "We have to support this other weird crap that nobody uses anymore" is like pain point #1 for nontrivial surgery.

tastroder 7y ago
I could not honestly judge that since I'm not familiar with the code base / project leadership at all. Given the project's reach I'd figure they have that part of the code thoroughly covered by tests and well enough separated to keep maintenance efforts on the low burner. The linked Google Doc says that usage in a 28-day window was at 0.01-0.03% of users (not sure which figure to use there). Sure, that sounds horrid at first but think about how many users Chrome has, that's not nothing either. Instead of implementing encrypted connections to make their software better, they jump to deprecate yet another protocol. I just find this really hard to grok. How many people used the profiling features of the developer tools in that time frame for example? Not many? That's cool, do we get to keep those anyway? Browsers are complex, yes, it just would be nice if we could expect a bit more of a graceful deprecation process with better communication. If you don't feel like supporting it, move it to an extension/plugin to separate it and put it somewhere the community can pick it up easily.