Re: [chromium-dev] Regarding UWP on Windows 10

[Matt Giuca]

Not sure exactly what you mean but I've been wondering along these lines. UWP is the new set of Windows APIs in Windows 10. The one I'm interested in specifically is the Share API (you can share a URL from the browser and Windows lets you pick an app to receive the share, a bit like intents on Android). Edge has this feature available from the menu.

On Thu, 12 May 2016 at 16:04 YUN LI <yunli....@gmail.com> wrote:

Devs,

Not sure if we community have plan to support UWP (Universal Windows Platform) on Windows 10.

My understanding is that in order to use these new APIs, Chrome would have to become a UWP app, which might mean we can no longer distribute it and update it ourselves (it would have to be distributed through the Windows Store). If that's the case, it's likely a deal breaker as we have a very carefully tuned install/update process. I'm curious, though, if this is actually the case or if there is some way to use these UWP APIs from Chrome without having to change the browser architecture or install/update mechanism.

 

Thanks for your reply!

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[YUN LI]

Thanks for your great replay! You really hit the point I would like to know. For the part of install/upgrade machanism you really help me have a clear big picture. 

Not sure if other forks have any inputs on this?

[Peter Kasting]

On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 6:48 PM, Matt Giuca <mgi...@chromium.org> wrote:

My understanding is that in order to use these new APIs, Chrome would have to become a UWP app,

This is correct AFAIK.  Various of us Windows folks have discussed this a bit, as there are other UWP-only APIs we might have liked to have used (e.g. the API that lets you modify your app titlebar color; instead we're moving to custom-drawing the whole window frame in all cases on Windows, and doing this ourselves).  My suspicion is that there's quite a bit of pain down this road (not just the update question), but it's possible that someday in the future we may end up forced to do something like this.  jschuh and scottmg know more here.

PK

[Scott Graham]

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=513976

UWP on 10 is less restrictive than Metro was on 8/8.1, but there's still limitations, see e.g. https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/uwp/porting/desktop-to-uwp-root#preparing-your-desktop-app-for-conversion-to-uwp .

The short version is that people have looked at it to support some platform integration features, but it's not clear if there's enough upside for the large effort at this point.

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[Matt Giuca]

On Fri, 13 May 2016 at 12:22 Scott Graham <sco...@chromium.org> wrote:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=513976

UWP on 10 is less restrictive than Metro was on 8/8.1, but there's still limitations, see e.g. https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/uwp/porting/desktop-to-uwp-root#preparing-your-desktop-app-for-conversion-to-uwp .

Ah, it's not quite clear from those docs whether UWP apps can have unrestricted access to a) registry and b) file system. Those docs suggest that UWP apps will be given a sandboxed / virtualised version of each of those (which would just be unacceptable for Chrome), but they also mention that UWP apps can have a "full trust" component and an "app container" component. Perhaps the "full trust" component can keep on using the real registery / file system. It's pretty vague.

(If that's the case, then this seems like a pretty nice architecture, allowing app developers a sliding scale of only asking for as much power as they need, with additional portability benefits for apps that don't require any "full trust" powers.)

 

The short version is that people have looked at it to support some platform integration features, but it's not clear if there's enough upside for the large effort at this point.

Perhaps we should collect a list somewhere of all the UWP capabilities that we want so we can judge whether there is enough critical mass to make this worth the effort?

My interest, as I said, is in using the Share Contract API, which I'd want to call from Ballista APIs if that goes ahead. [my notes]

[Giovanni Ortuño]

FWIW, Web Bluetooth is interested in using the BLE Scanning API.

[Allen Bauer]

The BLE APIs should be available outside the UWP sandbox; IOW, normal desktop apps can access them.

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Allen Bauer