OK, this sounds bad. But... Devil's advocacy here: are there any real-world examples of actual sites whose event behavior was actually broken by this change in Chrome 56? It happened a few months back, and I don't remember anyone complaining.
I mean... it broke the author's app. Probably a few others somewhere. But it seems not to have broken anything significant.
I guess I fail to see the concern here. It's an edge case of an existing API that apparently "no one used". Google found a way to get a benefit from exploiting a "change" in this "unused" API, presumably tested to make sure it was unused, and then went ahead and pushed the change over an 8 month period.
Is that really so awful? As someone who lived through the early '00's and IE, this seems pretty benign to my eyes.
It broke our web apps. Specifically, drag and drop list reordering functionality and image cropping. I was pissed when it happened. It wasn't a change that a typical content site would be broken by, but a lot of web apps were: drag/drop reordering isn't a very unusual feature these days.
There's a demo I wrote using jQuery UI Draggable that used to work with touch on mobile (using jquery ui touch punch) that no longer works.
I actually had no idea what could've broke it until I saw this submission. It's still not going to be fixed though since I don't remember the code. I assume a lot of people are in a similar position.
I mean... it broke the author's app. Probably a few others somewhere. But it seems not to have broken anything significant.
I guess I fail to see the concern here. It's an edge case of an existing API that apparently "no one used". Google found a way to get a benefit from exploiting a "change" in this "unused" API, presumably tested to make sure it was unused, and then went ahead and pushed the change over an 8 month period.
Is that really so awful? As someone who lived through the early '00's and IE, this seems pretty benign to my eyes.