Deprecations and removals in Chrome 74

Joe Medley
Joe Medley

Removals

Disallow opener navigation downloads from cross origin popups

If a popup navigates its opener to a URL which results in a download, the download will be blocked and the navigation cancelled, if the popup is cross-origin to its opener. This resolves a long standing security issue.

Chrome Platform Status | Chromium Bug

Remove PaymentAddress's languageCode property

The PaymentAddress.languageCode property has been removed from the Payment Request API. This property is the browser's best guess for the language of the text in the shipping, billing, delivery, or pickup address in the Payment Request API. The languageCode property is marked at risk in the specification and has already been removed from Firefox and Safari. Usage in Chrome is small enough for safe removal.

Intent to Remove | Chrome Platform Status | Chromium Bug

Deprecations

Deprecate drive-by downloads in sandboxed iframes

Chrome will soon prevent downloads in sandboxed iframes that lack a user gesture, though this restriction could be lifted via an allow-downloads-without-user-activation keyword in the sandbox attribute list. This allows content providers to restrict malicious or abusive downloads.

Downloads can bring security vulnerabilities to a system. Even though additional security checks are done in Chrome and the operating system, we feel blocking downloads in sandboxed iframes also fits the general thought behind the sandbox. Apart from security concerns, it would be a more pleasant user experience for a click to trigger a download on the same page, compared with downloads starting automatically when a user lands on a new page, or started non-spontaneously after the click.

Removal is expected in Chrome 74.

Intent to Remove | Chrome Platform Status | Chromium Bug

Deprecation policy

To keep the platform healthy, we sometimes remove APIs from the Web Platform which have run their course. There can be many reasons why we would remove an API, such as:

  • They are superseded by newer APIs.
  • They are updated to reflect changes to specifications to bring alignment and consistency with other browsers.
  • They are early experiments that never came to fruition in other browsers and thus can increase the burden of support for web developers.

Some of these changes will have an effect on a very small number of sites. To mitigate issues ahead of time, we try to give developers advanced notice so they can make the required changes to keep their sites running.

Chrome currently has a process for deprecations and removals of API's, essentially:

  • Announce on the blink-dev mailing list.
  • Set warnings and give time scales in the Chrome DevTools Console when usage is detected on the page.
  • Wait, monitor, and then remove the feature as usage drops.

You can find a list of all deprecated features on chromestatus.com using the deprecated filter and removed features by applying the removed filter. We will also try to summarize some of the changes, reasoning, and migration paths in these posts.