What's new and what's next: Electron & Chromium

Ben Gotow (@bengotow)

Electron• 364 pull requests closed since the last meet-up

• Cleaner public APIs, documentation in four more languages

• Web Notifications on Windows 8+

• Animated BrowserWindow.setBounds

Touch Events• Two new BrowserWindow events scroll-touch-begin, scroll-touch-end.

• IPC them into the renderer process and combine with wheel events to implement gestures!

https://github.com/bengotow/electron-swipe-to-archive

(Coming in the next Electron release)

Tracking Chromium

• Electron aggressively tracks Chromium and NodeJS releases.

• Currently at Chromium 47, Node 5.1.1.

• We’re one of the few communities that can build on new features immediately! So… what are the new features?

CSS Motion Paths

http://danielcwilson.com/blog/2015/09/animations-part-5/

requestIdleCallbackSchedule work when there is free time at the end of a frame, or when the user is inactive.

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/08/using-requestidlecallback?hl=en

requestIdleCallback• Ideal for unimportant tasks

which can be paused and resumed, and broken into fixed-time chunks.

• Building thumbnails • Sending analytics • Mining Bitcoin

“Call my function within X milliseconds and give me a function I can call to know when I’ve run out of time.”

requestIdleCallbackfunction myNonEssentialWork (deadline) { while (deadline.timeRemaining() > 0 && tasks.length > 0) doWorkIfNeeded();

if (tasks.length > 0) requestIdleCallback(myNonEssentialWork);}

// Wait at most two seconds before processing events.requestIdleCallback(processPendingAnalyticsEvents, { timeout: 2000});

array.indexOf(item) !== -1

array.includes(item)

ECMAScript 6

array.indexOf(item) !== -1

array.includes(item)

ECMAScript 6

pretty much here!

array.indexOf(item) !== -1

array.includes(item)

ECMAScript 6

Chromium 47

😅😳

Chromium 48

😍😎

Memory• Same task scheduling capabilities are driving smarter

garbage collection in Chromium for jank-free scrolling!

• With Gmail open, memory consumption in Chrome 45 is 45% lower than previous versions after two minutes. (50MB less!)

Coming Soon• VP9 Codec: WebRTC support for VP9! HD video

at almost half the bandwidth of VP8 or H264

Chrom

ium 48

Chrom

ium 49

• Proxy: Define custom behavior for fundamental operations (e.g. property lookup, assignment, enumeration, function invocation, etc)

Objective-C: objc_msgsend

Ruby: method_missing

JavaScript: Proxy.handler.apply 🎉

ben@nylas.com