Removing XSLT from Chromium

[Posted November 5, 2025 by jzb]

Mason Freed and Dominik Röttsches have published a document with a timeline and plans for removing Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) from the Chromium project and Chrome browser:

Chromium has officially deprecated XSLT, including the XSLTProcessor JavaScript API and the XML stylesheet processing instruction. We intend to remove support from version 155 (November 17, 2026). The Firefox and WebKit projects have also indicated plans to remove XSLT from their browser engines. This document provides some history and context, explains how we are removing XSLT to make Chrome safer, and provides a path for migrating before these features are removed from the browser.

LWN covered the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) discussion about XSLT in August.

What about RSS?

Posted Nov 5, 2025 18:24 UTC (Wed) by oliwarner (subscriber, #81320) [Link] (4 responses)

I use XSLT stylesheets to render RSS for users without a feed reader, which is most people since Google removed built-in RSS processing.

It's getting harder to keep RSS alive.

What about RSS?

Posted Nov 5, 2025 18:52 UTC (Wed) by cen (subscriber, #170575) [Link] (3 responses)

Most people don't read RSS at all, they just import it into some other application.

What about RSS?

Posted Nov 5, 2025 19:02 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (2 responses)

One of the cases made for keeping XSLT was -- I'm summarizing heavily here -- that a number of people stumble on RSS feeds without knowing what they are. Getting a mess of unstyled XML in the browser is not a good experience and does not help with RSS adoption. Some folks publish XSLT stylesheets that provide a readable view of the RSS feed and guidance on pulling that into a reader.

What about RSS?

Posted Nov 5, 2025 19:25 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

We should fix browsers to detect RSS and Atom, and put a standardized header at the top rather than raw XML. "This is a news feed, for use in a feed reader. You should open this URL in a feed reader that understands RSS."

What about RSS?

Posted Nov 5, 2025 19:28 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

This has zero impact on "RSS adoption". There's no such thing. The adoption phase is long gone, and we are in RSS decline.

That's the truth, even if we dislike it. Heh, I got mildly angry lately because Netvibes went to 💩 and I had to migrate to self-hosted Miniflux (which is cute, btw). I _just_ migrated to NV because Google Reader was killed!

next: javascript!

Posted Nov 5, 2025 18:39 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

While they are at it, they should remove javascript support, this would make chromium much safer.