[webkit-dev] Removing HTML notifications from WebKit (Was: Web Notifications API)

[Aaron Boodman]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 7:50 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 8, 2012, at 6:15 PM, Aaron Boodman wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Jon Lee <jonlee at apple.com> wrote:
>>> 2. Remove HTML notifications.
>>>
>>> It has been removed from the spec, and we don't intend on ever supporting
>>> HTML notifications. I brought this issue up before; is there an update on
>>> this front from any other platforms?
>>
>> HTML notifications are a pretty popular feature in Chrome's extension
>> system. As of a few months ago:
>>
>> * 614 extensions in our web store use createHTMLNotification
>> * 72 have more than 10k users
>> * 14 have more than 100k users
>> * 3 have more than 500k users
>> * 6.7M total actextension installs
>>
>> We can move developers off of this API, but not overnight. Is it
>> possible to come up with a slower deprecation plan than "immediately"?
>
> Since HTML notifications are already under a separate feature flag, it's probably practical to keep them around for a while, and just not include them in the proposed updated API. Do you have a suggestion for what might be a reasonable deprecation timeline?

Awesome.

Here is a rough plan of how deprecation could work:

0 months: Add a new extension format version and remove HTML
notifications support with that version.
2 months: Support for the new format version is in Chrome's stable
channel. The documentation advises the new format version, and new
features require it.
4 months: We start requiring the new manifest version for new
extensions uploaded to the store.
8 months: We start requiring the new manifest version for updates to
existing extensions in the store.
10 months: Remove support for the old manifest version from trunk of
Chrome. I believe at this point, we can remove the code from WebKit.

We've never actually done this before though, so there may be some
hiccups. I'd plan on about a year.

We have already started a new manifest format version for Chrome 18,
hopefully I can squeeze this change into that release.

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 9:24 PM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:
> Unrelated to timeline, it might be worthwhile to make
> createHTMLNotification a runtime-enabled feature so that we can avoid
> offering it to the web at large and possibly restrict it to only a
> whitelisted set of extensions.

This is a very good idea.

- a