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Comment by mcrider | Hacker News Reader

I'm generally okay with this, but it broke one of my sites and is the second time in recent months that Chrome has made a sweeping, possibly breaking change with its browser with basically zero warning (the other blocking location API requests over non-SSL connections). Not a fan of a browser vendor making these decisions with what AFAICT little consultation with standards bodies.

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The abandonment of backwards compatibility is concerning to me. Especially if the features are still on official standards or work on other browsers. Oftentimes I stumble across very old websites and everything works just fine a decade or more later. I love using web archive especially.

Once I came across an amazing list of old websites from the 90s, when there was a bunch of excitement around genetic algorithms. They had all sorts of little Java applets to simulate evolution of virtual organisms and pictures. A month later I wanted to show it to someone and suddenly none of them worked. Java had changed its security policies and there was no way to get them to work, that I could find.

As the person referenced in the article, I am keen to work out how we make developers aware of these changes. We've had the warning on the console for a while now, and it probably still won't be a little while before it roles out, so it's not like they are happening instantly... But we want to make sure developers are not surprised.

I swear I've never seen a warning for this or the Location API change.. And I have my console open always. Are the warnings only in Canary? I develop in Chrome stable.

Warnings are on all browser versions.. Location was a silly one though, you had to invoke the API to see the error, if you never actaully had devtools open when you called the API then you wouldn't know there was an issue.

There has been a warning about sync 3rd party scripts injected with document.write for quite a while now..

I see it all the time (some of our wonderful ad partners have been slow to drop `document.write`), but they easily become noise.

I was working just days ago on a page which injects a script with `document.write`, console open, in Chrome latest. Never saw a warning.

As the announcement stated, the warnings were only pushed to Stable this month. Less than 30 days does seem like much of a warning.

The initial plan is to execute this intervention when we detect the criteria being met. We started with showing just a warning in the Developer Console in Chrome 53. (Beta was in July 2016. We expect Stable to be available for all users in September 2016.)

Hey, Kinlan. Here's what you do. Once a month, on the same day every month, publish a browser change update. List every known upcoming change, and your best understanding of when it will happen. List every change that has already happened, and when it happened. Include dates for these changes in both Canary and Production releases.

Publish this update to Hacker News on the same day (and ideally, the same time) each month. It will not take too long before every dev in the world will be eagerly awaiting your update.

The key is consistency. If you publish this update 100% reliably (Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night...), then it will become the go-to way of hearing about browser issues.

Extra Credit - Get your friends at Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, etc. to contribute to the update for their respective browsers. If there was one place where ALL browser updates were documented, you will change the world.

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