Another thing that might help is more coordination between Mozilla and
Google on what to remove, and possibly even when.
I get the impression that as much as it annoys developers when an API
is removed, it annoys them even more if this is seen as a unilateral
move by one browser vendor. I've seen such feedback on this list, and
we have gotten similar feedback from developers when we've moved to
remove things from Gecko.
So for big items like showModalDialog and attribute-nodes, it might
help to coordinate on exactly what should be removed, and then make a
public announcement signed by both parties.
Another thing that can help is if we coordinate with spec authors and
get those features marked as deprecated in spec drafts and then point
to those spec drafts in the announcement.
I don't have any particular ideas for where we'd post such
announcements, so very open to ideas. I think mozilla both would be
happy to host them on mozilla branded locations like
hacks.mozilla.org, or have them hosted on google branded locations. Or
both.
For what it's worth, I think there's lots of overlap in what we want
to see removed. Things that come to my mind are attribute nodes
(possibly there's not agreement on ownerElement), showModalDialog,
namespaced attributes, sync XHR, XSLT and mutation events, but I'm
sure the list is much longer.
/ Jonas