Deprecations and removals in Chrome 90

Chrome 90 beta was released on March 11, 2021 and is expected to become the stable version in mid April, 2021.

# Remove Content Security Policy directive 'plugin-types'

The 'plugin-types' directive allows developers to restrict which types of plugin can be loaded via <embed> or <object> html elements. This allowed developers to block Flash in their pages. Since Flash support has been discontinued, there is no longer any need for this policy directive.

# Remove WebRTC RTP data channels

Chrome has removed support for the non-standard RTP data channels in WebRTC. Users should use the standard SCTP-based data channels instead.

# Return empty for navigator.plugins and navigator.mimeTypes

Chrome now returns empty for navigator.plugins and navigator.mimeTypes. With the removal of Flash, there is no longer the need to return anything for these properties.

# 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• They are superseded by newer APIs.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.