RuntimeEnabledFeatures flags that we might be able to remove

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David Baron

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Jan 12, 2024, 11:39:45 AMJan 12
to blink-dev
Since we've recently been more careful about creating feature flags for changes that have the possibility of breaking content, we've also been creating more feature flags than before.  This means that we're also creating a larger number of feature flags that have shipped to stable, been shown to be safe, and have served their purpose.  Many of these flags (and associated flag-controlled code) can hopefully be removed.

I made a spreadsheet of feature flags that have been shipped in stable along with the stable milestone they shipped in.  The sheet should be publicly viewable and editable by any Chromium committer.  The sheet itself has notes about how I made it (briefly: mostly with third_party/blink/tools/list_stable_features.py).

This sheet is presented as data to help folks remember to remove flags that they were intending to remove.  I'm sure there are a bunch of flags listed that shouldn't be removed, but also plenty that can be removed (either now or soon).

Feel free to add notes to the sheet, update owners as needed, and to write CLs to remove flags that we don't need anymore.

-David

Xianzhu Wang

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Jan 12, 2024, 1:34:22 PMJan 12
to David Baron, blink-dev
It seems that some old public features can also be removed. They have dedicated --disable-* command line switches or are bound to base features, but are not much different from the non-public ones which are also controllable with command line flags (--disable-features/--disable-blink-features) or through automatically defined base features. They are public perhaps just because they had existed before we added new ways to control blink runtime features, such as WebRuntimeFeatures::EnableFeatureFromString (instead of dedicated functions) and automatically defined base features.

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David Baron

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Mar 21, 2024, 8:51:31 PMMar 21
to blink-dev
I've updated the spreadsheet of stable feature flags to include features that shipped to stable in M121 and M122, and to remove flags that have been removed since my last update.  (I left the previous version of the sheet in the second tab.)  As before, hopefully this will prompt some removal of flags that we don't need any longer.

-David
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