"The Chrome Devs" is not a single entity, it would seem.
These don't seem like the same "The Chrome Devs" who broke every WebAudio app in existence by removing .noteOn within 12 months of .start being proposed as a replacement for it.
And that was a case where there was absolutely no long term harm keeping the recently deprecated method name around. It just seemed tidier to some junior dev someplace and nobody questioned it. There is actually a thread someplace where they moved it back by a build so that they would have a chance to fix Google's "Chrome WebAudio Showcase" site which had broken because of the change.
In this case though, I disagree that we're talking about backward compatibility. That's about not breaking things you previously released with things you release in the future. It takes Microsoft-Windows-esque attention to detail and testing effort to ensure you never break some fool's reliance on an undocumented feature.
These don't seem like the same "The Chrome Devs" who broke every WebAudio app in existence by removing .noteOn within 12 months of .start being proposed as a replacement for it.
And that was a case where there was absolutely no long term harm keeping the recently deprecated method name around. It just seemed tidier to some junior dev someplace and nobody questioned it. There is actually a thread someplace where they moved it back by a build so that they would have a chance to fix Google's "Chrome WebAudio Showcase" site which had broken because of the change.
In this case though, I disagree that we're talking about backward compatibility. That's about not breaking things you previously released with things you release in the future. It takes Microsoft-Windows-esque attention to detail and testing effort to ensure you never break some fool's reliance on an undocumented feature.