Deprecate and remove XSLT Link copied!
XSLT v1.0, which all browsers adhere to, was standardized in 1999. In the meantime, XSLT has evolved to v2.0 and v3.0, adding features, and growing apart from the old version frozen into browsers. This lack of advancement, coupled with the rise of JavaScript libraries and frameworks that offer more flexible and powerful DOM manipulation, has led to a significant decline in the use of client-side XSLT. Its role within the web browser has been largely superseded by JavaScript-based technologies, such as JSON and React.
Chromium uses the libxslt library to process these transformations, and libxslt was unmaintained for ~6 months of 2025. Libxslt is a complex, aging C codebase of the type notoriously susceptible to memory safety vulnerabilities like buffer overflows, which can lead to arbitrary code execution. Because client-side XSLT is now a niche, rarely-used feature, these libraries receive far less maintenance and security scrutiny than core JavaScript engines, yet they represent a direct, potent attack surface for processing untrusted web content. Indeed, XSLT is the source of several recent high-profile security exploits that continue to put browser users at risk.
For these reasons, Chromium (along with both other browser engines, Gecko and WebKit) plans to deprecate and remove XSLT from the web platform. The modern web is powered by three major browser engines: Blink (Chromium), Gecko (Firefox), and WebKit (Safari). They interpret code to render pages.
For more details, see this Chrome for Developers article.