Eh, sucks that it happened to you but looking at browser vendor's (lack of) reaction and even the bugzilla discussion ... I think you and yahoo might be the only ones to have ever had any significant repercussions come from this outside of some minor mobile network performance issue that sparked the bugzilla submission.
Riiight. Because browser vendors always fix important issues quickly. ;)
What's more likely is that very few large sites are experiencing this problem, and of the smaller sites that may have experienced it, many probably never even knew it, and those that knew it probably said "huh, weird", fixed it, and didn't bother mentioning it to anyone.
Nicholas Zakas and Yahoo! are trying to get browsers to actually fix the problem in order to prevent this from happening to other people, while also spreading the word so that people realize this is a potential problem.
One place other than simple server load where this problem could be extremely harmful is in measuring ad impressions. Even if the extra pageviews aren't enough to create a blip on your capacity radar, if you're telling advertisers that you served x-million impressions when only half of those were actually seen by users, it's going to seriously screw up your clickthru metrics, and your advertisers are going to be pretty pissed.
It's not so much that they're slow to respond, it's that they also own many of the ones that would be as susceptible as Yahoo. That combination suggests it's not or has not yet been a problem for most.
