Deprecations and removals in Chrome 103

Chrome 103 beta was released on May 26, 2022 and is expected to become the stable version in late June, 2022.

# Block external protocol in sandboxed iframes

Sandboxed iframes are not blocked from opening external applications. Currently, developers sandbox untrusted content and block user navigation. Blocking probably should have also included links to external apps or to the Play store. This has now been fixed.

Sites that need navigation can add the following values to the <iframe> element's sandbox property:

• allow-popups
• allow-top-navigation
• allow-top-navigation-with-user-activation

# Remove Battery Status API on insecure origins

The Battery Status API is no longer supported on insecure contexts, specifically HTTP pages and HTTPS iframes embedded in HTTP pages. This is being removed in accordance with our policy of deprecating powerful features on insecure origins, This also follows a spec change.

# Remove element

Given the removal of plugins from the web platform, and the relative lack of use of <param>, it is being removed from the web platform.

# 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• They are superseded by newer APIs.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.