Intent to Ship: Deprecate and remove window.defaultStatus and window.defaultstatus

[Mason Freed]

Contact emails

mas...@chromium.org

Explainer

None

Specification

None (and that's the point)

Summary

These two APIs originally were used to modify/control the "status bar" text at the bottom of browser windows. However, they have not had any effect on Chrome's status bar for quite some time (many years at least), and they are not standardized attributes. Gecko has not supported these attributes since version 23; WebKit still supports these attributes. The related window.status attribute *is* standardized, but also must never have an impact on the window status bar (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/window-object.html#dom-window-status). The window.status attribute is not being modified with this launch.

Blink component

Blink>HTML

Search tags

window.defaultstatus, status

TAG review

TAG review status

Not applicable

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

Gecko: Shipped/Shipping Shipped since Firefox 23.

WebKit: No signal

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

Ergonomics

N/A

Activation

The only compat issue would be if code specifically depends on the presence of `window.default[sS]tatus`. They have not had any behavioral impact for many years, so the risk of this seems very low.

Security

None

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

Debuggability

Debuggable via the console.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?

Yes

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

Yes

Flag name

WindowDefaultStatus

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://crbug.com/692835

Launch bug

https://crbug.com/692835

Estimated milestones

M108

Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

None - this is not a specified feature, and it is being removed for that reason.

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/4906826915643392

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Rick Byers]

I agree this is likely to be very low risk. I suppose it's not impossible that some site or WebView consumer could accidentally be depending on this, but I can't imagine any realistic way, or any way we could possibly quantify that remaining risk. I tried scanning a random sample of uses on GitHub, but all I found were things that would continue to work (setting it to a string value) and a few generic API presence tests.

I think we should go ahead without any further compat analysis. Worst case and you get even a single regression report from your CL then we should revisit.

LGTM1

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[Yoav Weiss]

LGTM2

Please include a base feature with this change, to ensure we have a kill switch in case this results in breakage.

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[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM3

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[Mason Freed]

Thanks all! I will definitely include a kill switch and will monitor for breakage.