Exploring Our v37 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 v37 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 Mac Support

We've introduced a new CI (Continuous Integration) infrastructure to support building OpenFin for the latest MacOS devices with the M-series arm64 processors. This makes sure our products work seamlessly on the latest Mac hardware.

And to maintain consistency across different MacOS platforms, we've adapted our test filters. Now, the same set of tests are executed when building for both M-series and Intel-based MacOS devices. This focuses testing efforts on the most important and relevant areas.

Cloud interop ready with setContextByGroupId

We’ve Extracted the logic from ‘setContext’ into a new method ‘setContextByGroupId’ that allows setting context without a client identity. This allows developers to set the context without needing a client identity which is useful for cloud-based context updates that lack an associated client.

Upcoming Deprecations and Behavioral Changes

Chrome Feature: Deprecate unload event

The Chrome team is in the process of deprecating the unload event, this change will be done in stages and v37 marks the first OpenFin version where the deprecations are active.

Now moving onto the Chromium side of things

OpenFin Container 37 contains features, enhancements and fixes that landed in Chromium 123 and 124 - and is released co-stable with 124.

On average each OpenFin major version includes fixes for over 100 specific security bugs from the Chromium team so we would expect something similar for v37 - we now have the numbers for v36 which you can see here…

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:

ServiceWorker static routing API

The Service Worker Static Routing API allows developers to bypass the service worker for certain types of requests, improving website performance. Developers can configure which parts of the site should go directly to the network, skipping the service worker startup process. This avoids performance penalties while still preserving the benefits of service workers, like offline support and custom caching.

WebSocketStream: integrating streams with the WebSocket API

The WebSocketStream API is a new way to work with real-time, two-way communication on the web. It combines the core functionality of the WebSocket API with the more modern and flexible Streams API, making it easier for developers to handle incoming and outgoing data.

Document Render-Blocking

Developers can control when a page starts rendering, by delaying the initial rendering until the most critical content has been fully loaded and parsed. This ensures a consistent first paint experience across browsers, which is important for features like View Transitions that rely on the initial DOM state. Developers can implement a `<link rel=expect href="#id">` syntax to specify which elements the browser should wait for before starting to render the page.

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So that's it for our quick overview of Container 37 - For more information and further details on the release - Head over to our versions page to access the OpenFin Release Notes or reach out to info@openfin.co.