Deprecations and removals in Chrome 102

Chrome 102 beta was released on April 28, 2022 and is expected to become the stable version in late May, 2022.

# Deprecate PaymentRequest.show() without User Activation

Sites can no longer call PaymentRequest.show() without a user activation. Allowing PaymentRequest.show() to be triggered without a user activation could be abused by malicious websites. To protect users, the spec was changed to require user activation. To avoid a broken purchase experience, calls to this method should now be inside a user event such as click.

Firefox has not shipped PaymentRequest at all, while Safari's implementation already requires user activation for calling show().

# Remove SDP Plan B

The Session Description Protocol (SDP) used to establish a session in WebRTC has been implemented with two different dialects in Chromium: Unified Plan and Plan B. Plan B is not cross-browser compatible and is hereby removed.

In this version of Chrome an exception will be thrown when Plan B is used. Developers needing to avoid the exception can participate in a deprecation trial until May 25, 2022. If you participated in the previous deprecation trial that ended in December, and want participate in the current trial, you will need to request a new token.

# 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• They are superseded by newer APIs.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.