Modes

Neutralinojs applications can be executed on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Browser with four modes: window, browser, cloud, and chrome. The default mode is the window. In other words, your application will run inside a native window by default. However, you can choose the following modes according to your requirement.

window

Neutralinojs application will run on a native window. The window will use the user's operating system's theme. This mode is a good selection for cross-platform application development.

browser

Neutralinojs application will use the user's default browser to load the application. Therefore, you can build web applications with native operations. You can't typically access operating system-level features via web browsers. But, the Neutralinojs browser mode helps you to make web apps that can access the operating system layer with required security controls.

cloud

This mode will run the Neutralinojs process as a background server. You will be able to expose your application to a public network or the internet.

tip

Example scenario: You can make a web application to control your computer via mobile phones.

Besides, you can run the Neutralinojs server on bare-metal servers, virtual machines, and application containers as a lightweight message broker. You may find endless use-cases for this framework mode.

danger

Make sure that you are blocking or allowing critical native operations via nativeBlockList, nativeAllowList respectively. Also, if you started the application with administrator access, your web application will have the same permission level.

chrome

Neutralinojs app will run as a Chrome application. The framework uses the following Chrome command-line arguments to make the web application look more like a native app.

--disable-background-networking
--disable-background-timer-throttling
--disable-backgrounding-occluded-windows
--disable-breakpad
--disable-client-side-phishing-detection
--disable-default-apps
--disable-dev-shm-usage
--disable-infobars
--disable-extensions
--disable-features=site-per-process
--disable-hang-monitor
--disable-ipc-flooding-protection
--disable-popup-blocking
--disable-prompt-on-repost
--disable-renderer-backgrounding
--disable-sync
--disable-translate
--disable-windows10-custom-titlebar
--metrics-recording-only
--no-first-run
--no-default-browser-check
--safebrowsing-disable-auto-update
--password-store=basic
--use-mock-keychain
--user-data-dir=${NL_PATH}/.tmp/chromedata

Neutralinojs chrome mode works on a computer that has a pre-installed version of Google Chrome, Chromium, or Microsoft Edge browser. If no installation was detected, Neutralinojs displays an error message by asking the user to install a Chromium-based browser.

You can provide additional arguments (Eg: --disable-web-security) to the Chrome process via args configuration attribute. Browse all supported Chromium command-line arguments here