Deprecations and removals in Chrome 81

Joe Medley
Joe Medley

Deprecation and Remove "basic-card" support Payment Handler

This version of Chrome removes the basic-card polyfill for Payment Request API in iOS Chrome. As a result, the Payment Request API is temporarily disabled in iOS Chrome. For full details, see Rethinking Payment Request for iOS.

Intent to Remove | Chrome Platform Status | Chromium Bug

Remove supportedType field from BasicCardRequest

Specifying "supportedTypes":[type] parameter for "basic-card" payment method shows cards of only the requested type, which is one of "credit", "debit", or "prepaid".

The card type parameter has been removed from the spec and is now removed from Chrome, because of the difficulty of accurate card type determination. Merchants today must check card type with their PSP, because they cannot trust the card type filter in the browser:

  • Only issuing banks know the card type with certainty and downloadable card type databases have low accuracy, so it's impossible to know accurately the type of the cards stored locally in the browser.
  • The "basic-card" payment method in Chrome no longer shows cards from Google Pay, which may have connections with issuing banks.

Intent to Remove | Chrome Platform Status | Chromium Bug

Remove the element

Chrome 81 removes the <discard> element. It is only implemented in Chromium, and is thus not possible to use interoperably. For most use cases it can be replaced with a combination of animation of the display property and a removal (JavaScript) callback/event handler.

Intent to Remove | Chrome Platform Status | Chromium Bug

Remove TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the protocol which secures HTTPS. It has a long history stretching back to the nearly twenty-year-old TLS 1.0 and its even older predecessor, SSL. Both TLS 1.0 and 1.1 have a number of weaknesses.

  • TLS 1.0 and 1.1 use MD5 and SHA-1, both weak hashes, in the transcript hash for the Finished message.
  • TLS 1.0 and 1.1 use MD5 and SHA-1 in the server signature. (Note: this is not the signature in the certificate.)
  • TLS 1.0 and 1.1 only support RC4 and CBC ciphers. RC4 is broken and has since been removed. TLS’s CBC mode construction is flawed and is vulnerable to attacks.
  • TLS 1.0’s CBC ciphers additionally construct their initialization vectors incorrectly.
  • TLS 1.0 is no longer PCI-DSS compliant.

Supporting TLS 1.2 is a prerequisite to avoiding the above problems. The TLS working group has deprecated TLS 1.0 and 1.1. Chrome has now also deprecated these protocols.

Intent to Remove | Chromestatus Tracker | Chromium Bug

TLS 1.3 downgrade hardening bypass

TLS 1.3 includes a backwards-compatible hardening measure to strengthen downgrade protections. However, when we shipped TLS 1.3 last year, we had to partially disable this measure due to incompatibilities with some non-compliant TLS-terminating proxies. Chrome currently implements the hardening measure for certificates which chain up to known roots, but allows a bypass for certificates chaining up to unknown roots. We intend to enable it for all connections.

Downgrade protection mitigates the security impact of the various legacy options we retain for compatibility. This means user's connections are more secure and, when security vulnerabilities are discovered, it is less of a scramble to respond to them. (That, in turn, means fewer broken sites for users down the road.) This also aligns with RFC 8446.

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.