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On Tuesday, the team behind Electron, the web framework for building desktop apps, announced the release of Electron 6.0. It comes with further improvement in the ‘Promise’ support, native Touch ID authentication support for macOS, native emoji and color picker methods, and more. This release is upgraded to Chrome 76, Node.js 12.4.0, and V8 7.6.

Promisification of functions continue

Starting from Electron 5.0, the team introduced a process called “promisification” in which callback-based functions are converted to return ‘Promises’. In Electron 6.0, the team has converted 26 functions to return Promises and also supported callback-based invocation. Among these “promisified” functions are ‘contentTracing.getCategories()’, ‘cookies.flushStore()’, ‘dialog.showCertificateTrustDialog()’, and more.

Three new variants of the Helper app

The hardened runtime was introduced to prevent exploits like code injection, DLL hijacking, and process memory space tampering. However, to serve the purpose it does restricts things like writable-executable memory and loading code signed by a different Team ID.  If your app relies on such functionalities, you can add an entitlement to disable individual protection.

To enable a hardened runtime in an Electron app, special code signing entitlements were granted to Electron Helper. Starting from Electron 6.0, three new variants of the Helper app are added to keep these granted entitlements scoped to the process types that require them. These are ‘Electron Helper (Renderer).app)’, ‘(Electron Helper (GPU).app)’, and ‘(Electron Helper (Plugin).app)’.

Developers using ‘electron-osx-sign’ to codesign their Electron app, do not have to make any changes to their build logic. But if you are using custom scripts instead, then you will need to ensure that the three Helper apps are correctly codesigned. To correctly package your application with these new helpers, use ‘[email protected]’ or higher.

Miscellaneous changes to Electron 6.0

  • Electron 6.0 brings native Touch ID authentication support for macOS.
  • There are now native emoji and color picker methods for Windows and macOS.
  • The ‘chrome.runtime.getManifest’ API for Chrome extensions is added that returns details about the app or extension from the manifest.
  • The ‘<webview>.getWebContentsId()’ method is added that allows getting the WebContents ID of WebViews when the remote module is disabled.
  • Support is added for the Chrome extension content script option ‘all_frames’. This option allows an extension to specify whether JS and CSS files should be injected into all frames or only into the topmost frame in a tab.
  • With Electron 6.0, the team has laid out the groundwork for a future requirement, which says that all native Node modules loaded in the renderer process will be either N-API or Context Aware. This is done for faster performance, better security, and reduced maintenance workload.

Along with the release announcement, the team also announced the end of life of Electron 3.x.y and has recommended upgrading to a newer version of Electron.

To know all the new features in Electron 6.0, check out the official announcement.

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Bhagyashree R