Chrome 158 kills browser XSLT, and government data sites will feel it most
Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT: what breaks and what does not
On November 17, 2026, Chrome 158 stops running client-side XSLT, and Edge will follow. Sitemaps and feeds lose only their friendly formatting; crawlers never executed the stylesheet, so search is unaffected. The real damage lands on public bodies like congress.gov and weather.gov that made raw XML readable the cheapest way available. Google cites security and a 0.02% usage figure, while critics note nobody has counted the affected sites.
The cost of this change does not land on SEO teams at all; it lands on public bodies that published machine-readable data and made it human-readable the cheapest way the platform offered.
- cousin_it
When I first learned that XSLT was going away, I got curious how to achieve the same thing in JS (client-side templating that happens during page load, without any "flash of content"). It turns out there's a very nice way to do it, by using inline scripts that append elements next to document.currentScript. Lean Rada wrote about it here: https://leanrada.com/notes/inline-rendering-currentscript/ and I wrote about it as well: https://vladimirslepnev.me/write
- Telaneo
At least Firefox will still have it, although with Mozilla being the way that it is, I wouldn't be surprised if they follow suit.
I feel the same way about this that I do about removing Flash support: it's good that we're moving on to better things, but that doesn't help if there aren't better things to move on to.
What's the simple goto for making web based games that kids can mess around with? It was Flash, and now it's nothing. How do you set up an RSS feed to not just blast raw XML at the user? Soon it won't be XSLT any more, but I don't see a good replacement (even more annoying is the fact that browsers used to have features to handle RSS feeds by themselves, and XSLT was used to sidestep that problem, but now there's no more side to step).
- mcculley
I am still using XSLT. I have been using it for 26 years. I generate XML documents on the backend and turn them into HTML for various reports. XSLT has a lot of features and power that newer templating languages lack.
Are any of these newer templating languages worth me switching?
- Trustable8
Shame back in the XHTML days XSLT was a spec that could have made website modularity so much cleaner. I once created an early website creation tool that merged separate components using XSLT it was really powerful in the days before javascript was usable without jQuery. However XHTML was dropped in favor of HTML5 and XSLT was pretty much useless after that. Its done well to survive this long I presume it was mainly kept to style XML files.
- cosmic_cheese
Feels crazy to me that to date, this was the only widely supported way to pull in shared bits of HTML like headers, navigation, and footers without anything dynamic on either end. It’s such a basic and common use case to be so poorly covered.