Comment by bawolff

> the maintainers' own admission the code was never intended to be security critical

I find this hard to believe. XML is a portable data serialization format. The entire point of XML is to transfer data between separate parties who preumably dont trust each other. Most non browser xml usages are security criical and have been from the beginning.

Just look at their website from 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20010202061700/http://xmlsoft.or... they specificly advertise processing remote documents from http & ftp as a usecase.

Second, i don't know what libxml has to do with anything. I know the libraries are related but browsers are not removing libxml they are removing libxslt.

> Neither Google nor Apple were willing to sponsor a fork of the project but clearly they can't risk unmaintained dependencies in their billion dollar product, so they're rushing to pull the plug.

Why would they sponser a fork? I wouldn't in their position. A fork solves the maitenance issue but not the other problems. The lack of maintainers exasperbate the problem, but it is not the problem.

There is this weird entitlement people have with google where people expect google to randomly provide open source projects with free labour even if its not inline with google's interests.

If google was demanding someone else step up to maintain, then saying they should do it would be reasonable. But they aren't doing that. After all a new maintainer did step up, but the deprecation is still happening as it wasnt solely about that.

> but Javascript USB drivers and serial ports are necessary to drive the web

I also think these are stupid features, but their risk profile is probably quite a bit lower than xslt. Not all code has the same risk factors. What sort of api is exposed, how its exposed, code quality, etc all matter.

Ultimately though its google's web browser. People have this weird entitlement with google where they expect google to make specific product decisions. Its open source software. The solution to google making bad product decisions is the right to fork. If the decisions are that bad, the fork will win. Having google design their software by a comittee, where a comittee is the entire internet,is not reasonable nor would it make a good product.