Deprecations and removals in Chrome 105

Chrome 105 beta was released on August 4, 2022 and is expected to become the stable version in late August, 2022.

# Remove WebSQL in non-secure contexts

WebSQL in non-secure contexts is deprecated. The Web SQL Database standard was first proposed in April 2009 and abandoned in November 2010. Gecko never implemented this feature and WebKit deprecated it in 2019. The W3C encourages Web Storage and IndexedDb for those needing alternatives.

Developers should expect that WebSQL itself will be deprecated and removed when usage is low enough. For more information, see Deprecating Web SQL.

# CSS default keyword is disallowed in custom identifiers

The CSS keyword ‘default’ is no longer allowed within CSS custom identifiers, which are used for many types of user-defined names in CSS (for example, names created by @keyframes rules, counters, @container names, custom layout or paint names). This adds 'default' to the list of names that are restricted from use in custom identifiers, specifically 'inherit', 'initial', 'unset', 'revert', and 'revert-layer'.

# Deprecations in the Navigation API

The transitionWhile() and restoreScroll() methods are also deprecated in this release, and we expect to remove them in 108. Developers who need this functionality should use the new intercept() and scroll() methods. For explanations of the problems with the existing methods and examples of using the new, see Changes to NavigateEvent.

# Deprecate non-ASCII characters in cookie domain attributes

To align with the latest spec (RFC 6265bis), Chromium will soon reject cookies with a “Domain” attribute that contains a non-ASCII character (for example, Domain=éxample.com). Support for IDN domain attributes in cookies has been long unspecified, with Chromium, Safari, and Firefox all behaving differently. This change standardizes Firefox’s behavior of rejecting cookies with non-ASCII domain attributes.

Since Chromium has previously accepted non-ASCII characters and tried to convert them to normalized punycode for storage, we will now apply stricter rules and require valid ASCII (punycode if applicable) domain attributes.

A warning is printed to the console starting in 105. Removal is expected in 106.

# Remove Gesture Scroll DOM Events

The gesture scroll DOM events have been removed from Chrome, specifically, gesturescrollstart, gesturescrollupdate and gesturescrollend. These were non-standard APIs that were added to Blink for use in plugins, but had also been exposed to the web.

# 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.