What is the shell type in chrome extensions? Can this be used to hide a window?

Question

I just noticed this in the trunk / dev channel:

type ( enumerated string ["normal", "popup", "panel", "app", "shell"] ) 

Type of browser window.

I tried this with Canary: the window does not appear, but we have console output, so something was created. The fact is that I just do not understand. How does this differ from the background page?

I was hoping to completely disable windows from a custom view without reloading the contents of the window upon transition. Anyway, I do not really hope, because you cannot update the window type with chrome.windows.update. But the question still remains: what is the type of "shell"?

Answer 1

The "shell" has moved to the new chrome.app.window API in r140947 . Then it seems to have disappeared from there in the documentation.

Answer 2

The shell currently does nothing for extensions and should not be used.