Deprecations and removals in Chrome 101

Chrome 101 beta was released on March 31, 2022 and is expected to become the stable version in late April, 2022.

# Reduce user agent string information

Chrome is reducing the amount of information the User-Agent string exposes in HTTP requests as well as in navigator.userAgent, navigator.appVersion, and navigator.platform. We're doing this to prevent the user agent string from being used for passive user fingerprinting. To join the origin trial, see its entry on Chrome Origin Trials.

# Remove WebSQL in third-party contexts

WebSQL in third-party contexts is now removed. The Web SQL Database standard was first proposed in April 2009 and abandoned in November 2010. Gecko never implemented this feature and WebKit deprecated it in 2019. The W3C encourages Web Storage and Indexed Database for those needing alternatives.

Developers should expect that WebSQL itself will be deprecated and removed when usage is low enough.

# 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• They are superseded by newer APIs.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.