Important: Chrome will be removing support for Chrome Apps on all platforms. Chrome browser and the Chrome Web Store will continue to support extensions. Read the announcement and learn more about migrating your app.
Disabled Web Features
Though Chrome Apps use the web platform, some web features have been disabled or else are used in a different way. Mainly this is to avoid security issues and to improve programming practices. Below is a summary of the disabled features of the web platform and potential work-arounds:
| Disabled | Work-around |
|---|---|
alert |
Use a custom lightbox/popup. |
| Browser chrome APIs | N/A. |
confirm |
Use a custom lightbox/popup. |
document.cookie |
Packaged app pages are not rendered on the server, so there is no need to use these. |
document.close |
N/A. |
document.open |
N/A. |
document.write |
Use document.createElement. |
| External resources | Use the webview tag for iframes.
See Embed Content
and Webview Tag API.
Video and audio are allowed to have non-local URLs. |
| Flash | Use HTML5 Platform. |
| Form submission | Use JavaScript to process form content (listen for submit event, process data locally first before sending to server). |
| javascript: urls | You cannot use bookmarklets for inline javascript on anchors. Use the traditional click handler instead. |
| localStorage | Use IndexedDB or the Storage API (which also syncs to the cloud). |
| Navigation | Links open up with the system web browser.
window.history and window.location
are disabled. |
| Non-sandboxed plugins | N/A. |
showModalDialog |
Use a custom lightbox/popup. |
Synchronous XMLHttpRequest |
Use async-only XMLHttpRequest:
Getting Rid of Synchrounous XXRs. |
| User Text selection | By default,
users can no longer select text like they can on a web page.
To make areas of the app's text selectable,
apply the CSS style, -webkit-user-select: text;. |
| webSql | Use IndexedDB or Filesystem API. |