Google Chrome will remove words such as blacklists and whitelists

After protests about violent law enforcement and racial discrimination were raised across the United States, the Google Chrome development team said it would delete the blacklist and whitelist used in the project.

Google said that such common terms may inadvertently strengthen the following concepts: black = bad white = good. This may enhance the concept of racial discrimination in subtle ways.

For this reason, Google Chrome decided to replace the blacklist in the project with a blocklist, and the whitelist was replaced by the allowlist.

From the blacklist to the blocklist, we can see that Google Chrome only needs to change a letter, but the development team cannot directly perform the batch replacement in the source code.

Because many function modules have references to the original blacklist, if they simply replace letters in batches, many function modules may be abnormal.

It is also true that Google Chrome has actually replaced this term since 2018, but it has not been replaced until now, and the specific completion time is temporarily unclear.

At the same time, Google Chrome also updated the development guide to provide developers with ethnically neutral examples. Third-party developers need to follow this example for development.

At present, there are about 2,000 blacklists in the source code of the Chromium project that has not been replaced. Google said that it will make changes and merge after completing the code review in the near future.

Via: 9to5google