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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

Tell me. I cannot, off the top of my head, think of a single feature that shipped across all major browsers that has been removed.

(For example: <blink> was never in WebKit or IE; Web SQL was never in Firefox or IE.)

Well, OK, I’ll count SharedArrayBuffer, which shipped across the board for a couple of months before being disabled for security reasons, and took up to four years before being shipped again, in slightly restricted form.

I wouldn’t count applets or plugins like Flash, because they weren’t really part of the web platform, and they also still work in theory, it’s just that the plugins in question no longer exist.

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I recall FTP support being very widespread. I'm sure JavaScript support has gone through massive changes. There have been other HTML tags deprecated. There's plenty of (security) headers that have been deprecated.

I wouldn’t call FTP part of the web platform—it was never integrated. All you could do was link to it, and then the browser might be able to render it itself (Firefox and Chromium, until a few years ago), or open another app that could (IE and Safari, and Firefox and Chromium probably can still).

JavaScript has added things, not removed them.

There are other HTML elements and attributes that were never in any spec and were supported by only some browsers, which are no longer supported (either it was IE, or the feature was removed), and explicitly described as obsolete in the HTML Standard. But they were never supported by more than two of the three or four main engines, or if they were their functionality has been retained.

So, if you have anything that has actually been removed from the web platform, please be more specific.

Mutation Events were once in all 3 moderns engines plus some legacy ones and is now removed from everything.

Third-party cookies are now heavily restricted and while not quite removed everywhere cannot be relied upon.

document.domain is no longer settable by default in Chromium, and other browsers are aligned on matching this.

There's other APIs that have been restricted to secure contexts only.

The list goes on and on, the idea that the web is this unbreakable surface isn't true. It does break things and that is a good thing, if you want the platform to succeed for decades to come they should be able to fix mistakes.

> But they were never supported by more than two of the three or four main engines, or if they were their functionality has been retained.

Isn't this the same as a feature being removed from the web platform? If not, then what are the exact engines I need to consider to think of a a feature that has been removed?

This is all stuff from the turbulent times where Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were frequently doing different and incompatible things. I don’t think any of the things that actually got removed were even supported by both of them.

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