Deprecations and Removals in Chrome 59
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Technical Writer
In nearly every version of Chrome, we see a significant number of updates and improvements to the product, its performance, and also capabilities of the Web Platform. This article describes the deprecations and removals in Chrome 59, which is in beta as of April 27. This list is subject to change at any time.
Temporarily disable navigator.sendBeacon() for some blobs
The navigator.sendBeacon() function has been available since Chrome 39. As originally implemented, the function's data argument could contain any arbitrary blob whose type is not CORS-safelisted. We believe this is a potential security threat, though no one has yet tried to exploit it. Because we do NOT have a reasonable immediate fix for it, temporarily, sendBeacon() can no longer be invokable on blobs whose type is NOT CORS-safelisted.
Although this change was implemented for Chrome 60, it is has since been merged back to Chrome 59.
Remove features from WebVR that are not in the revised spec
The current implementation of WebVR, originally implemented in Chrome 52, contained several methods and properties that will not be in the final spec. Deprecation messages were added for these features for the Origin Trial that started in Chrome 56. These features and are now being removed. They include:
VRDisplay.getPose()VRDisplay.resetPose()VRDisplay.isConnectedVRDisplayCapabilities.hasOrientationVREyeParameters.fieldOfView
Intent to Experiment | Chromestatus Tracker | Chromium Bug | Origin Trial Results so Far
Remove FileReaderSync from service workers
The Service Worker spec has always had the (non-normative) note that "any type of synchronous requests must not be initiated inside of a service worker", to avoid blocking the service worker (as blocking the service worker would block all network requests from controlled pages). However synchronous APIs such as FileReaderSync were still available in service workers. FileReaderSync was deprecated in Chrome 57. It is removed in Chrome 59.
Intent to Deprecate | Chromestatus Tracker | Chromium Bug
Remove non-standard DeviceOrientation Event initialization functions
For some time now there's been a general trend in browser APIs away from initialization functions and toward object constructors. The most recent version of the DeviceOrientation Event Specification follows this trend by requiring constructors for both DeviceOrientationEvent and DeviceMotionEvent.
Since Chrome is enabling these constructors by default in Chrome 59 the legacy initialization functions, initDeviceMotionEvent() and initDeviceOrientationEvent() are also removed. Edge has deprecated the initialization functions and Firefox has already shipped the constructors.
Intent to Remove | Chromium Bug
Remove "on-demand" value for hover/any-hover media queries
The “on-demand” value for hover/any-hover media queries was removed from the spec about a year ago. Consequently, these media queries are removed in Chrome 59.
Intent to Remove | Chromestatus Tracker | Chromium Bug
Remove MediaStreamTrack.remote
In Chrome 48 the MediaStreamTrack.remote property was added in support of the Media Capture and Streams API with the goal of allowing JavaScript to know whether a WebRTC MediaStreamTrack is from a remote source or a local one.
Since that time, this property has been removed from the spec. As of Chrome 59, it is no longer supported.
Remove support creating ProgressEvent with document.createEvent()
Earlier versions of the DOM spec required implementation of document.createEvent("ProgressEvent"). However usage was always low and support has already been removed from Gecko and Webkit. The event itself was removed from the spec in March of this year.
To conform with the platform and most recent spec, ProgressEvent is now removed from Chrome.
Remove SVGTests.required Features
In the first version of the SVG spec, an application could call DOMImplementation.hasFeature to verify that a particular SVG interface is supported. Many SVG elements contained a requiredFeatures attribute that returned the same information.
In SVG2 DOMImplementation.hasFeature property always returns true. Consequently requiredFeatures no longer does anything useful. Because it was removed from the spec it was deprecated in Chrome 54 and has now been removed.
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