Deprecations and removals in Chrome 89

Chrome 89 beta was released on January 28, 2021 and is expected to become the stable version in the first week of March 2021.

# Remove prefixed events for

The legacy prefixed events (webkitprerenderstart, webkitprerenderstop, webkitprerenderload, and webkitprerenderdomcontentloaded) dispatched on <link rel=prerender> are now removed from Chrome.

Chrome Platform Status

# Stop cloning sessionStorage for windows opened with noopener

When a window is opened with noopener, Chrome will no longer clone the sessionStorage of its opener; it will instead start an empty sessionStorage namespace. This brings Chrome in conformance with the HTML specification.

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• They are superseded by newer APIs.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.