Chrome 95 beta was released on September 23, 2021 and is expected to become the stable version in late October, 2021.
FTP support removed
Chrome is removing support for FTP URLs. Use of FTP in the browser is sufficiently low that it is no longer viable to invest in improving the existing FTP client. In addition, more capable FTP clients are available on all affected platforms.
Google Chrome 72 and later removed support for fetching document subresources over FTP and rendering of top level FTP resources. Currently navigating to FTP URLs results in showing a directory listing or a download depending on the type of resource. A bug in Google Chrome 74 and later resulted in dropping support for accessing FTP URLs over HTTP proxies. Proxy support for FTP was removed entirely in Google Chrome 76. In Chrome 86 FTP support was turned off for pre-release channels (Canary and Beta) and experimentally turned off for one percent of stable users, though it could be reenabled via the command line. In Chrome 87 it was turned off for fifty percent of users but could also be enabled through the command line. Since Chrome 88, it was only available through a deprecation trial and is now disabled.
Support for URLs with non-IPv4 hostnames ending in numbers
Most hostnames that aren't valid IPv4 addresses, but end in numbers are treated
as valid, and looked up via DNS (for example, http://foo.127.1/). Per the Public
Suffix List spec, the eTLD+1 of the hostname in that URL should be 127.1. If
that is ever fed back into a URL, http://127.1/ is mapped to
http://127.0.0.1/ by the URL spec, which seems potentially dangerous.
127.0.0.0.1 could also potentially be used to confuse users.
URLs with these hostnames are now rejected.
WebAssembly cross-origin module sharing
Chrome now deprecates sharing WebAssembly modules between cross-origin, but same-site environments to allow agent clusters to be scoped to origins long term.
Deprecate U2F API (Cryptotoken)
Chrome's legacy U2F API for interacting with security keys is deprecated. It will be disabled by default in Chrome 98.
Affected sites should migrate to the Web Authentication API. Credentials that were originally registered via the U2F API can be challenged via web authentication. USB security keys that are supported by the U2F API are also supported by the Web Authentication API. U2F security keys themselves are not deprecated and will continue to work.
U2F is Chrome's original security key API. It allows sites to register public
key credentials on USB security keys and challenge them for building
phishing-resistant two-factor authentication systems. U2F never became an open
web standard and was subsumed by the Web Authentication API (launched in Chrome
67). Chrome never directly supported the FIDO U2F JavaScript API, but rather
shipped a component extension called cryptotoken, which exposes an equivalent
chrome.runtime.sendMessage() method. U2F and Cryptotoken are firmly in
maintenance mode and we have encouraged sites to migrate to the Web
Authentication API for the last two years.
The following timeline is currently planned for deprecation and removal:
Chrome 95
Beta as of September 23, 2021. The following changes were implemented:
- Logged a deprecation notice in the DevTools console for every request.
Chrome 96
Beta expected in late October 2021, stable in November. The following changes were implemented:
- Gated U2F API requests behind a user permission prompt.
The permission prompt can be suppressed by enrolling in the U2FSecurityKeyAPI deprecation trial or enabling the U2fSecurityKeyApiEnabled enterprise policy.
Chrome 98
Beta expected in early January 2022, stable in February. The U2F API will be disabled by default. Only sites enrolled in the deprecation trial or enterprises that turned on the U2fSecurityKeyApiEnabled policy will be able to use U2F at this point.
Chrome 103
Beta expected in late May 2022, stable in late June. The deprecation trial will end on July 26, 2022.
Chrome 104
Beta expected in late June 2022, stable in early August. The U2F API will be fully removed.
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.