What's new in Atom Shell 0.20.x
January 21, 2015 zcbenz
This is the first article in our new “What’s new in Atom Shell” series, which will walk you through the new features from the most recent Atom Shell releases.
Transparent windows
By setting the transparent
option in BrowserWindow to true
, you can now make the window use a transparent background, which enables you to create a window of arbitrary shape. For more on this check out the guide on transparent windows.
Registering your own secure scheme
When using a custom protocol in an HTTPS page, you may encounter a warning like
this:
Mixed Content: The page at ‘https://secure.website/messages/general/’ was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure font ‘custom-resources:fonts/TTF/Lato-Hairline.ttf’. This content should also be served over HTTPS.
With webFrame.registerUrlSchemeAsSecure, you can now register a URL scheme as secure to get rid of this mixed content warning.
Disabling the HTTP cache
By passing –disable-http-cache on the command line, you can now disable the HTTP cache when showing a remote page.
Using template images for icons on dark menu bar
When creating a status item on OS X’s menu bar, you may want your icon to adapt to the Yosemite dark menu bar. By simply suffixing the icon’s filename with Template
you can mark the icon as a template image, then you can use the Tray API to create an status item that can adapt to both light and dark menu bars.
Disabling web security in <webview>
The disablewebsecurity attribute is the same as the web-security
option of BrowserWindow, allowing you to disable the web security mechanism entirely and let the web page in a <webview>
tag do whatever it wants.
Spell check in text areas and input fields
If you want to enable Chrome’s native spell-checking in your web app, you can now use the webFrame.setSpellCheckProvider API with any spell checking library you’d like to highlight spelling errors.
Sending messages from webview to the host page
If you are providing some custom APIs for pages in <webview>
, you may want to try the new ipc.sendToHost API, which can send a message to the host page directly. The messages sent from <webview>
will be fired as an [ipc-message](https://github.com/atom/atom-shell/blob/master/docs/api/web-view-tag.md#ipc message) event in host page.
Removing size limit of localStorage
The localStorage
object in Atom Shell no longer has the size limit, so you can store as much data there as you want. Previously the localStorage
size limit was a meager 5MB.
Upgrade to Chrome 39
Atom Shell is now using the latest Chrome 39 stable release to render web content.