Impacts of the upcoming deprecation of mutation events in Chrome for VertiGIS Studio and Geocortex customers

We’ve received lots of recent inquiries about the removal of mutation events in Chrome on July 30, 2024.

For VertiGIS Studio, there is no impact or action required.

For Geocortex Essentials and the Geocortex Viewer for HTML5 there is a possible impact on a very small number of customers.

There is a single code path in GE/GVH that is impacted. This is connected to a specific feature, which is not turned on by default, or configurable using Geocortex Essentials Manager.

You can confirm if a GE/GVH application is impacted by opening the application in Chrome and viewing the console log. Affected apps will show this warning in the console.

[Deprecation] Listener added for a 'DOMSubtreeModified' mutation event. This event type is deprecated, and will be removed from this browser VERY soon. Usage of this event listener will cause performance issues today, and represents a large risk of imminent site breakage. Consider using MutationObserver instead. See https://chromestatus.com/feature/5083947249172480 for more information.

The specific feature setting in GE/GVH is found in the *.json.js configuration files associated with your GVH viewers. Within those files there is a MapTextProvider section in the Accessibility module that looks like this:

{

    "id": "MapTextProvider",

    "type": "geocortex.essentialsHtmlViewer.mapping.modules.accessibility.MapTextProvider",

    "decimalPrecision": 4,

    "readAttributionInformation": false,

    "isEnabled": true

},

The specific setting that uses this code path occurs when readAttributionInformation is set to true. 

We will be releasing a 4.15.2 maintenance release of Geocortex Essentials and the Geocortex Viewer for HTML5 soon. There is no need to upgrade to this version unless you have an application with the feature above enabled that is producing the console warning message.

Related, but with zero impact on GE/GVH. The Esri JavaScript 3.x API also contains a single use of mutation events in the Esri JavaScript 3.x table widget. This widget is not used anywhere in GE/GVH.

Also related, but with zero impact to any VertiGIS or Geocortex product. ArcGIS Enterprise is releasing patch versions to fix the menu in the Portal interface. This is a UI issue in Esri Portal. No changes to any API used by VertiGIS, therefore no impact. https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/impact-of-google-chrome-and-microsoft-edge-127-updates--000032813 

For more information on the removal of mutation events please refer to: https://chromestatus.com/feature/5083947249172480