Exploring Our v36 Container Updates

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By Chuck Doerr, CIO and Co-Founder

At OpenFin, we're committed to helping teams work smarter, faster, and more effectively. To fulfill our mission of enabling frictionless, productive workflows on the desktop, we recently introduced v36 of Container. This version includes new OpenFin features and all the latest critical security patches, bug fixes, deprecations, and features from Chromium. Let's unpack a few of the key updates:

Enhanced Control over $$appManifestUrl Usage

To create a safer and more controlled development environment, we’re introducing an update to the handling of the $$appManifestUrl feature. This feature is important for developers who need to fetch dynamic application manifests.

If you use $$appManifestUrl, we will send warnings on usage with links to our recommendations. Starting with v36 developers can disable $$appManifestUrl with an option. In Container v38 this feature will be disabled by default.

Enhanced Tray Icon Popup Handling

Container v36 improves how popup menus associated with tray icons are managed and displayed. This enhancement addresses a critical issue where popup menus were improperly layered behind the taskbar when activated.

We've introduced two new APIs Application.showTrayIconPopupMenu and Application.closeTrayIconPopupMenu.

These functions can be triggered when interacting with a tray icon to display the popup menu in an unparented fashion, making sure it appears above the taskbar regardless of other window focus states.

Upcoming Deprecations and Behavioral Changes

Layout.init() `layoutManager`

The undocumented `layoutManager` property of the return value of `fin.Platform.Layout.init()` is scheduled for removal in version 39 and should be treated as deprecated starting with version 37.

$$appManifestUrl

Starting in Container v38 the $$appManifestUrl feature will be disabled by default.

New Benefits in Chromium

OpenFin Container 36 contains features, enhancements and fixes that landed in Chromium 121 and 122 - and is released co-stable with 122.

Staying current with Chromium goes beyond consuming these critical security updates. We also get all the new features and enhancements of the web platform. Here I will quickly highlight 3 of them:

Legacy Cookie Storage Migration

Chromium recently introduced a change to its cookies migration policy where it will only support the migration of cookies from versions within two years of the current, stable release. This will take effect beginning in Runtime 33 and will mean that cookies will not be migrated for runtimes older than Runtime 22.

HTMLSelectElement showPicker()

Developers have been asking for a way to programmatically open the option picker of a select element - Chromium now allows us to do this and it’s a big UX win for everyone.

Read unsanitized HTML via the Async Clipboard API

Prior to this enhancement all HTML that was copied/pasted was run through the Chromium sanitizer - in many instances this sanitization impacted the fidelity of the copied content - now developers have the option to cleanly grab the unsanitized content without loss.

Have questions on any of the new capabilities introduced in Container v36? For more details, head over to our versions page for the release notes, or reach out to info@openfin.co to set up a demo.