While updating my Twitter bio to point here (hi!), I came across @cure53's keynote from Nullcon a few months ago: https://youtu.be/IEv2t_mABXM.

It massively overstates my role in rolling out `SameSite` cookies by default, but a core message resonates with me: we should aim to change the web's default behavior when possible, because opt-in mitigations are difficult to scale.

These are, unfortunately, also the hardest changes to ship precisely because they have sweeping effects across the ecosystem.

Keynote | Do we get stuff done? We don’t get stuff done? Or do we? Or will we? | Mario Heiderich

YouTube

Chrome's poking at defaults on a few fronts right now (`document.domain` deprecation and
https://wicg.github.io/private-network-access/ come to mind), and it's slow-going. We need to understand the impact of each change on the masses of developers who can't reasonably be expected to be paying attention to blink-dev@, and we need to ensure that we support them through shifts in browser support for behavior they rely upon.

https://deprecate.it/ has some of the metrics I'm tracking. They're basically all too high. :/

Private Network Access

@mikewest Has anyone considered versioning the web to apply new defaults in new versions? This is how other software domains deal with breaking changes. As in allow websites to specify a version or “edition” to opt into new features.. and defaults.
@blinkygal @mikewest Similar to the <!doctype html> declaration disabling quirks mode? From developer perspective, that felt/feels like a version change due to different (improved!) behavior when opting in.
@AlesandroOrtiz @mikewest Sorta but that was also about html behaviour and I am thinking more about defaults for security and enabling new features entirely rather than behaviour differences.

@blinkygal @AlesandroOrtiz @mikewest Seems like there might be multiple options here with very different tradeoffs, such as different options for what we're fixing:
- versioning to fix "everything we think is a mistake"
- versioning to fix a few very critical things (e.g., a few security defaults)

Then there's the question of what you don't get if you don't opt in to the new thing, e.g.:
- don't get all new features
- just get the "mistakes" fixed
- etc.

@blinkygal @AlesandroOrtiz @mikewest

Some folks at Mozilla tried to push for this with "you only get new features if you're HTTPS". It didn't really go very far, and got a *lot* of pushback.

Also, some of these options (especially "fix lots of mistakes") have pretty high costs to implement interoperably and properly test in WPT, etc.

@dbaron @blinkygal @AlesandroOrtiz We had a short conversation around the general topic of versioning in WebAppSec a ~month ago: https://github.com/w3c/webappsec/blob/main/meetings/2023/2023-03-15-minutes.md#linked-on-or-after. TL;DR: general versioning that bundles unrelated changes isn't something folks see as consistent with the web's philosophy.

Something opt-in like https://github.com/mikewest/baseline-header might be a reasonable (though low-reward) start. Ideally, we'll be able to harden `[SecureContext]` a la https://github.com/mikewest/securer-contexts, but that still requires long deprecations.

webappsec/2023-03-15-minutes.md at main · w3c/webappsec

Web Application Security Working Group repo. Contribute to w3c/webappsec development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
@mikewest @dbaron @AlesandroOrtiz That’s too bad :( Reads very pessimistic about vendors being able to agree something should be deprecated. Maybe that needs a process similar to how agreement occurs to add new things.

@blinkygal @dbaron @AlesandroOrtiz I think security folks at various vendors can generally agree on things that we'd like to remove from the platform. Shifting from that conversation to agreement on the set of new features that we would tie to deprecations as part of a versioning system is more difficult. We don't have a culture of using additions to the platform as an incentive for change.

David mentioned Secure Context restrictions, which is the only example I can think of in the recent past.