Basically, the ask for forgiveness approach. It's common in large, dysfunctional organizations as well. Sometimes the easiest way to get attention is to break things. Then once enough pain is felt, everyone starts taking interest. Trying to follow a proper change control based process only works when everyone is invested in the process.
In the browsers anything that's not behind a flag is immediately relied on by people.
So no, you shouldn't ask for forgiveness and pretend that you're just gathering data.
That's why what Google is routinely doing now (releasing APIs after a very short period in origin trial and without ever reaching consensus) is so dangerous.
