Flash was a plugin to the browser ecosystem that no one ever made a commitment to other than "here it is".
SSLv2 and v3 all are protocol versions that anyone can still support, and removing support for them breaks certain web properties. This is less of a problem because the implementations of the protocol are themselves time-limited (you can't get an SSL certificate that is valid until the heat death of the universe).
FTP and gopher support wasn't removed from the browser without a redirect (you can install an FTP client or a Gopher client and the browser will still route-out-to-it).
The point isn't "RFC = commitment", the point is that "the culture of the web" has, for a very long time, been "keep things working for the users" and doing something like removing built-in FTP support was something that was a _long_ time in coming. Whereas, as I understand it, there is a perfectly valid way forward for continuing to support this tech as-is in a secure manner (WASM-up-the-existing-lib) and instead of doing that, improving security for everyone and keeping older parts of the web online, the developers of the browsers have decided that "extra work" of writing that one-time integration and keeping it working in perpetuity is too burdensome for _them_. It feels like what is being said by the browser teams is, "Yes, broken websites are bad for end users, yes, there are more end users than developers, yes, those users are less technical and therefore likely are going to loose access to goods they previously had ... but c'est la vie. Use {Dusk, Temple}OS if you don't want the deal altered any further." And I object to what I perceive as a lack of consideration of those who use the web. Who are the people that we serve.
SSLv2 and v3 all are protocol versions that anyone can still support, and removing support for them breaks certain web properties. This is less of a problem because the implementations of the protocol are themselves time-limited (you can't get an SSL certificate that is valid until the heat death of the universe).
FTP and gopher support wasn't removed from the browser without a redirect (you can install an FTP client or a Gopher client and the browser will still route-out-to-it).
The point isn't "RFC = commitment", the point is that "the culture of the web" has, for a very long time, been "keep things working for the users" and doing something like removing built-in FTP support was something that was a _long_ time in coming. Whereas, as I understand it, there is a perfectly valid way forward for continuing to support this tech as-is in a secure manner (WASM-up-the-existing-lib) and instead of doing that, improving security for everyone and keeping older parts of the web online, the developers of the browsers have decided that "extra work" of writing that one-time integration and keeping it working in perpetuity is too burdensome for _them_. It feels like what is being said by the browser teams is, "Yes, broken websites are bad for end users, yes, there are more end users than developers, yes, those users are less technical and therefore likely are going to loose access to goods they previously had ... but c'est la vie. Use {Dusk, Temple}OS if you don't want the deal altered any further." And I object to what I perceive as a lack of consideration of those who use the web. Who are the people that we serve.