Things People Get Wrong About Electron

Felix Rieseberg:

I dedicated years bringing web technologies and desktop apps closer together. The most recent and most successful project in that vein is Electron, which I’ve spent the last ten years working on.

As an open source project, our website never had to “convince people” to use Electron, so I never took the time to actually explain why I’m betting on web technologies to build user interfaces or why I prefer bundling a rendering engine.

Electron’s choices, especially the very idea of building interfaces with web tech and shipping large parts of Chromium to render them, are not uncontroversial. Reasonable people wonder why we made those choices.

I finally took the time to write down the arguments for the choices that we made. You can find that document on the Electron homepage. It tries to pre-empt a lot of common misconceptions. This post is a pairing suggestion—and discusses some of the things I believe people get most wrong about Electron on the Internet today.

I’ll admit I’m not a huge Electron fan. Slack’s early years soured me on it considerably. Back then it would regularly use 2Gb or more of RAM, which was outrageous on a contemporary machine with 8Gb of RAM.

Nowadays Electron apps are somewhat unavoidable, and seem to be a bit better behaved. Still, there’s no standard UI across Electron apps, and each one bringing 100Mb or more of Chromium along for the ride¹ does not fill me with joy. Ultimately, Electron feels like a tool that’s good for business, not a tool for building amazing applications.

Nonetheless it’s interesting to read this perspective on Electron from one of its developers. I certainly don’t agree with some of the arguments though:

Electron pits JavaScript versus native code

The argument: JavaScript isn’t the right choice for everything. Native is better. Electron is not native.

This misconception is likely the fault of Electron’s maintainer team and especially me. Most of the talks I’ve given in the earlier days of Electron highlighted its ability to interact with the operating system from JavaScript.

However, the entire point of Electron is that you can pair your web app with any native code you want to write—specifically with C++, Objective-C, or Rust.

I don’t think that point is well advertised or a reflection of Electron use in practice. From my experience most Electron apps use JavaScript and web technologies as much as possible, only using native code if absolutely necessary. In contrast Tauri seems to emphasise the native back-end aspect of their implementation quite a bit more. Right on their home page they say:

Write your frontend in JavaScript, application logic in Rust, and integrate deep into the system with Swift and Kotlin.

Whereas the only similar thing on the Electron home page is:

Native graphical user interfaces

Interact with your operating system’s interfaces with Electron’s main process APIs. Customize your application window appearance, control application menus, or alert users through dialogs or notifications.

The APIs that it’s talking about are JavaScript APIs… so that you can stay in JS land and not have to write native code.

Most Electron apps clock in around 100 to 300 MB. From first principles, smaller is obviously better. Nobody argues that a bigger app is better than a smaller app.

But: Users, both in the consumer and business space, do not care. One hour of Netflix at 4K is roughly 7 GB, a typical Call of Duty update regularly clocks in more than 300 GB. In practice, we have not seen end users care about binary size more than they do about virtually anything else your engineering team could spend time on.

This feels like its coming from an incredibly privileged and sheltered viewpoint. I’m sure there are plenty of places in the world where people do care a lot about downloads clocking in at hundreds of megabytes. No doubt there’s a bunch of them here in Australia—my parents still have a 12MBit connection. Additionally, there’s a big difference between ephemeral downloads for streaming and downloads that permanently take up space on your hard disk (multiplied by every Electron app you have installed).