Intent to Remove: Legacy Web Notifications

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Peter Beverloo

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Feb 28, 2014, 7:28:36 AM2/28/14
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Summary
Remove support for the Legacy Web Notification API, as described in the following document:

Support for HTML notifications was removed in 2013 already, and we deprecated support for this feature in M33. If this Intent is successful, removal will happen for M35 (Stable @ May 20).

Blink will still have support the latest specification:

Motivation
The API is proprietary to Chrome, has very little usage and leads to another layer of abstraction in Blink's Notification module.

Usage information from UseCounter
As measured using the "LegacyTextNotifications" histogram, UseCounter reported 0.000527% usage over the past 28 days (down from 0.001437% in November).

Compatibility Risk
Reasonably small. This is a proprietary API which only shipped in Chrome and Safari for Mac OS X. UseCounter numbers are very low.

Row on feature dashboard?

Thanks,
Peter

Jochen Eisinger

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Feb 28, 2014, 7:30:18 AM2/28/14
to Peter Beverloo, blink-dev
lgtm

PhistucK

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Feb 28, 2014, 7:59:06 AM2/28/14
to Jochen Eisinger, Peter Beverloo, blink-dev
Did Safari drop support for the legacy, proprietary API (your words were a bit ambiguous)?


PhistucK


lgtm
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Peter Beverloo

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Feb 28, 2014, 8:42:59 AM2/28/14
to PhistucK, Jochen Eisinger, blink-dev
According to FeatureDefines.xcconfig in the WebKit tree, support is only enabled for Mac OS X Safari builds:
    http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebKit2/Configurations/FeatureDefines.xcconfig#L136

I created a quick test page and verified that support for legacy notifications indeed is not enabled for mobile Safari (using iOS 7):

Thanks,
Peter

PhistucK

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Feb 28, 2014, 8:59:39 AM2/28/14
to Peter Beverloo, Jochen Eisinger, blink-dev
So just to be accurate regarding the original intent motivation section - it is also used in Safari on Macintosh.
Right?


PhistucK

Peter Beverloo

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Feb 28, 2014, 9:34:38 AM2/28/14
to PhistucK, Jochen Eisinger, blink-dev
Ah, I see what you mean now -- I mentioned Safari on Mac OS X under the Compatibility Risk section :-).  Thanks!

Peter

Adam Barth

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Feb 28, 2014, 11:37:11 AM2/28/14
to Peter Beverloo, PhistucK, Jochen Eisinger, blink-dev
LGTM

Thanks for cleaning up this mess.  Hopefully we'll make the author of this blob post happy:


Adam

Jochen Eisinger

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Feb 28, 2014, 11:40:37 AM2/28/14
to Adam Barth, blink-dev, Peter Beverloo, PhistucK

His main complaint was that permission doesn't work in the new api, and we fixed that long ago :)

Kenneth Auchenberg

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Mar 1, 2014, 4:08:38 AM3/1/14
to Jochen Eisinger, Adam Barth, blink-dev, Peter Beverloo, PhistucK
Well. it's now fixed, but it took you almost a year to get W3C Notifications right in Chrome :)

Safari (as of 7.0.1) ships with both W3C Notifications and Legacy Web Notification API, so it should be fine to remove Legacy Web Notification in Chrome, as most people anyway use were forced to use a polyfill to get cross-browser working.

I'll update my blog post, once this intent has happened.

/k

Adam Barth

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Mar 1, 2014, 4:11:00 AM3/1/14
to ken...@auchenberg.dk, joc...@chromium.org, blin...@chromium.org, pe...@chromium.org, phis...@gmail.com
On Sat Mar 01 2014 at 1:08:59 AM, Kenneth Auchenberg <ken...@auchenberg.dk> wrote:
Well. it's now fixed, but it took you almost a year to get W3C Notifications right in Chrome :)

Yeah, we kind of dropped the ball on this one.  Better late than never?

Safari (as of 7.0.1) ships with both W3C Notifications and Legacy Web Notification API, so it should be fine to remove Legacy Web Notification in Chrome, as most people anyway use were forced to use a polyfill to get cross-browser working.

I'll update my blog post, once this intent has happened.

Many thanks!

Adam

Eric Seidel

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Mar 3, 2014, 12:47:12 PM3/3/14
to Adam Barth, ken...@auchenberg.dk, Jochen Eisinger, blink-dev, Peter Beverloo, Alon Gothshmidt
lgtm
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