Deprecations and removals in Chrome 94

Chrome 94 beta was released on August 26, 2021 and is expected to become the stable version in late September, 2021.

# Deprecate and Remove WebSQL in Third-Party Contexts

WebSQL in third-party contexts is now deprecated. Removal is expected in Chrome 97. The Web SQL Database standard was first proposed in April 2009 and abandoned in November 2010. Gecko never implemented this feature and WebKit deprecated this feature 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.

# Restrict Private Network Requests for Subresources to Secure Contexts

Private network requests for subresources may now only be initiated from a secure context. Private network requests are those initiated from a public network, targeting a private network. Examples include internet to intranet requests and intranet loopbacks.

This is a first step towards fully implementing Private Network Access. Servers running inside local networks, or on a user's device, expose powerful capabilities to the web in ways that can be quite dangerous. Private Network Access proposes a set of changes to limit the impact of requests to these servers by ensuring that the servers are opting-into any communication with external entities.

For this opt-in to have any meaning, the servers need to be able to ensure that the client origin is authenticated. To that end, only secure contexts are empowered to make external requests.

# 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• They are superseded by newer APIs.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.