🚨 Improving Native Message Host Reliability on Windows 🚨

[sivsouvamMSFT]

If you are building a browser extension that needs to interact with the system using Native Messaging, we have good news for you!

We've just landed a changelist in Chromium to improve this scenario for Edge Version 113.0.1769.0 (Chromium version 113.0.5656) and later. The change means that Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and other Chromium-derived browsers will now directly invoke any Native Host that is a Windows Executable (.exe) rather than going through cmd.exe. This fix should make Native Messaging more reliable and avoid the issues caused by cmd.exe, which could prevent it from running the Host.

However, this change also fixes two other bugs that were caused by the cmd-in-the-middle flow, so be aware that it could cause problems if your Windows executable was not aware of the expected behaviour for Native Hosts.

• The change means that Windows .exe files are now correctly started hidden, so you might need to adjust your application's code if you expect it to be visible to the user. Additionally

• The change means that the browser will correctly terminate your native host two seconds after closing its input/output streams.

For more details and examples of the bugs that were fixed, check out the blog post. We hope this change will make Native Messaging on Windows more robust and reliable for everyone.

As always, feedback and bug reports are welcome!