Things people get wrong about Electron
February 3, 2025
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. Operating systems already have user interface libraries. In those libraries is usually also some kind of WebView, often actually based on Blink (Windows) or WebKit (macOS, many Linux distributions). Why go through all that trouble of bundling parts of Chromium? And, even if we go through that trouble, why do so many apps (Visual Studio Code, Slack, Discord, Figma, ChatGPT, Claude, Notion, 1Password, Docker Desktop, and many more) go along with it?
Felix Reiseberg is a maintainer of Electron, a project whose goal is to make web apps run like desktop apps. It’s a decade old now, and it gets quite a lot of negative responses, but it is unambitious and important project, that powers the likes of Visual Studio Code and Slack on the Desktop
My hope is that as the browser’s APIs continue to improve, apps delivered via Electron will increasingly become Progressive Web Apps.
Felix here provides some thoughts about what people get wrong about Electron.
