Intent to Remove: Prefixed Gamepad

[Brandon Jones]

Primary eng (and PM) emails

baj...@chromium.org

Link to “Intent to Deprecate” thread

The decision to deprecate was made in the Gamepad Intent to Ship thread.

Summary

navigator.webkitGetGamepads will be removed, leaving navigator.getGamepads as the only way to interact with gamepad devices.

webkitGetGamepads was deprecated in M35, which went stable in May of 2014.

Motivation

webkitGetGamepads has subtlety different functionality from getGamepads, and is not cross-browser compatible. It also is not receiving any new features or fixes. Removing it forces developers to use the version of the API that has the most browser support and the most comprehensive feature set.

Usage information from UseCounter

https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/291

Usage of the prefixed API is very low: 0.0002%

Entry on chromestatus.com

https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5118776383111168

Compatibility Risk

Usage of the gamepad API in any form is low, and the prefixed version more so, so there's not much compatibility risk.

There is one Google Doodle that I know of which has not been updated to use the standard API: http://www.google.com/doodles/hurdles-2012 This doodle already lacks gamepad support in other capable browsers, however, like Firefox and IE.

[Philip Rogers]

LGTM

I imagine most of the usage comes from that doodle. Could you contact the doodle group and see if they could update it to work with the new api?

[Philip Jägenstedt]

LGTM2

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[Brandon Jones]

On Tue Dec 16 2014 at 11:47:20 AM Philip Rogers <p...@chromium.org> wrote:

I imagine most of the usage comes from that doodle. Could you contact the doodle group and see if they could update it to work with the new api?

I've let the Doodle team know about the change and will help them with the update if they need it. 

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM3

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[kh...@google.com]

Thanks for the heads up! Doodles with gamepad support have been updated to try navigator.getGamepads first.

http://www.google.com/doodles/30th-anniversary-of-pac-man

http://www.google.com/doodles/basketball-2012

http://www.google.com/doodles/hurdles-2012

http://www.google.com/doodles/slalom-canoe-2012

http://www.google.com/doodles/soccer-2012

Tested using a Logitech Gamepad F310

navigator.getGamepads().item(0).id == Logitech Dual Action (STANDARD GAMEPAD Vendor: 046d Product: c216)