Safelist distributed web schemes for registerProtocolHandler()

Category: Miscellaneous
Type: New or changed feature
Status: Enabled by default (Chrome 86)
Intent stage: Evaluate readiness to ship

Summary

Extend the list of URL schemes that can be overridden via registerProtocolHandler() to include "cabal", "dat", "did", "dweb", "ethereum", "hyper", "ipfs", "ipns", and "ssb".

Motivation

Extending the list to include decentralized web protocols allows resolution of links to generic entities independently of the website or gateway that’s providing access to it.

Standards & signals

Specification: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/5482
Firefox: Positive — See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1271553 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1428446
Safari: No signal — Does not implement registerProtocolHandler, public support on extending the whitelist rather than switching to a blocklist.
Web developers: Positive
Tracking bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=651311

Docs: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#custom-handlers

Explainers: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/7nHTRUP1EGY

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