“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
This is the noticeboard for upcoming proposed changes for Blink. You may not have known about its location before, but that does not mean it was hidden away or intentionally obscure.
And now everyone who has ever made a website needs to carefully track that location, just because it might otherwise quietly break their production site? There are plenty of better ways for people to spend their time than searching through every website of everything you have ever made code for.
Software changes. It's an unfortunate reality of the profession. If you're someone who relies on the web platform for your living, you, at a minimum, need testing on the beta and dev versions of all major browsers your users use, so you'll get early notice of these types of issues. There's not any alternative approach besides never changing any installed feature, which is a possible approach, but not the one we as a species are taking.
Ideally, people would. But for most, a browser breaking such a basic feature is just not on the radar. I would imagine there is a good number of extremely simple sites (or parts of sites that you'd easily assume wouldn't ever need maintaining) that this breaks. IMO, breaking a feature requires it to either be pretty much never used, have a very good reason, or be heavily publicized. This change has none.
Reasoning seems fine to me. This is reflective of different priorities, I suppose, but my view is that the primary use of alerts are scams and new JS users on sites like codepen. Removing the feature would prevent the abuses, which do far more harm than the few legit use cases do good. Especially since, for the legit uses, there are mostly straightforward fixes. A tiny handful out of the billions of users of the web platform were affected negatively. It's not an optimal tradeoff, but it's pretty close.