What Happened to Lightweight Desktop Apps? History of Electron’s Rise

It had one key killer feature: "embedding Node.js and Chromium to provide a powerful desktop runtime for web technologies." But is that worth a world of bloated desktop apps?

Electron is one of the more notorious tools in the modern developer’s toolbox. If you squint, it’s a cousin to React Native - promising “write once, ship everywhere” - but with far less painful build-and-release overhead than mobile development. Its killer feature is bundling Node.js and Chromium together to create a powerful desktop runtime for web technologies. The official Electron blog recently marked its 10-year anniversary, which is wild considering how deeply it’s permeated developer culture.

By the mid-2020s, we’ve reached a point where most new software starts as a website (with the typical HTML/JS stack) and later expands to desktop for better ergonomics - whether that’s a direct dock icon, easier OS-level integrations, or just a more focused workspace. Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity followed this pattern, even if they didn’t necessarily jump on Electron. Still, for many teams wanting to quickly bundle an app, Electron offers near-instant cross-platform support plus coveted “web-style” benefits like automatic updates and zero-friction releases.

When our engineering team at Graphite needed a lightweight desktop extension, we also gravitated to Electron in no time - especially once we saw the auto-updater. But I’ve often wondered: for a framework with such dominance, where exactly did it come from? Turns out the answer is somewhat surprising - GitHub created it.

The Pre-Electron Era

Electron only dates back to 2013, which is not that long ago. Before shipping web apps in desktop wrappers was a thing, developers typically coded fully separate native applications for each platform. Want Mac support? Write Objective-C or Swift and deal with Cocoa. Want Windows support? Roll up your sleeves for C++, C#, or .NET. Linux? Even more configuration fun. Each platform had distinct UI paradigms, code idioms, and build pipelines, so maintaining consistency was a headache. Many teams ended up maintaining two or three codebases, each with its own subtle differences.

A few cross-platform toolkits, like Qt or JavaFX, offered partial solutions but often came with complicated integration layers, inconsistent UI experiences, and occasionally awkward performance. Meanwhile, Java via the JVM was powerful but never felt particularly seamless for consumer-facing desktop apps. Sure, it let you “write once, run anywhere,” but not everyone wanted to wrangle Swing or JavaFX to build a modern UI. And if you needed to ship to the web itself, the JVM wasn’t going to help.

So if you go back to, say, 2010, building a cross-platform desktop app often felt like trudging uphill in two feet of snow.

How Electron Emerged

Enter 2013: Electron, initially called “Atom Shell,” was created by Cheng Zhao, an engineer at GitHub. It wasn’t some altruistic open-source gift - rather, it was purpose-built to power the Atom editor, GitHub’s new “hackable” text editor that relied on web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS) but needed to run on desktop. GitHub funded and nurtured the framework from the start. As a result, Electron quickly benefited from real-world testing, consistent developer feedback, and a large user base - essentially, the Atom community.

Ironically, while Atom itself has been overshadowed by Visual Studio Code, its underlying framework grew stronger and more general-purpose. Within a few years, “Atom Shell” was renamed Electron and reached a solid 1.0 release in 2016. By that point, Slack and GitKraken (among others) had already adopted it. And then came the big one: Microsoft shipped VSCode on top of Electron. That alone legitimized Electron for many enterprise teams.

Under the Hood: Key Technical Choices

Electron’s real breakthrough was embedding both Node.js and Chromium. That allows JavaScript to communicate directly with native OS capabilities while simultaneously rendering a browser-based UI - an irresistible combo for many web developers. The multi-process architecture is roughly modeled on Chromium’s:

1. Main Process: Handles app-level concerns such as creating windows, tying into OS-level APIs, and managing the overall lifecycle. It’s effectively the “brains” of your Electron app.

2. Renderer Processes: Each window or “view” runs in its own process, rendering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This isolation boosts stability since a renderer crash won’t necessarily take down the entire app.

3. Auto-Updater: Electron ships with a built-in autoUpdater module. It’s easy to forget that automatic updates have historically been non-trivial in native software. With Electron, you get it with minimal fuss, which is a huge boon for shipping frequent patches or incremental new features.

This structure means a front-end-heavy dev team can push out a desktop version of their web app with minimal friction. It’s precisely why so many startups lean on Electron: time-to-market is usually more critical than memory footprint.

Developer Gripes: Bloat and Redundancy

Electron has faced its fair share of criticism - especially around bloat. Each Electron application bundles its own Chromium instance, so if you’ve got Slack, VSCode, and Discord all open, you’re essentially running three copies of Chrome in parallel. That leads to massive memory usage and large app binaries. A trivial “Hello, world” in Electron might weigh in at over 100MB, which is considered downright monstrous by some purists.

Back in the early days, Electron also had some stability hiccups. Users occasionally encountered “white screens of death” if the renderer crashed. The community eventually hammered away at these, and modern Electron is much more robust. Still, the overhead can be a deal-breaker for teams prioritizing performance and resource usage.

From a security standpoint, Electron apps aren’t typically sandboxed like a modern browser tab. One unscrupulous dependency or an insecurely loaded script could give an attacker deeper access to the OS. For that reason, it’s critical to treat Electron development with the same seriousness you’d apply to native app security: enable contextIsolation, restrict remote code execution, be diligent about packages, and so on. It’s not insurmountable - just requires discipline.

Interestingly, some well-funded apps explicitly avoid Electron. ChatGPT is the best recent example: given that OpenAI has the engineering bandwidth, they built native clients for Windows, macOS, iOS, etc. Some suspect they wanted a deeply integrated experience or better performance (and, let’s be real, if your app name has “AI” in it, you likely care about not wasting cycles). It’s a big ask for a smaller team, though. Most of us don’t have the resources to build and maintain multiple native implementations - hence, Electron remains popular.

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Tauri and the Future

Over the years, Electron has radically lowered the barrier to entry for building desktop software. Developers who were once confined to web technologies could suddenly package their work as a native-feeling app - no separate codebases required. That approach sparked new ideas and quick prototypes, brought fresh voices into desktop software, and gave us a wave of tools like Atom, Slack, and VSCode that might have been too expensive to build natively for three platforms. From my perspective, Electron’s real success is how it turned “let’s make a desktop client” from a dreaded, specialized endeavor into just another feasible weekend project.

Of course, not everyone has embraced the memory overhead or the cost of shipping a full Chromium instance with each app. In response, frameworks like Tauri have emerged to solve these exact pain points. Tauri, for instance, relies on the operating system’s native webview instead of bundling its own browser engine. That alone can shrink a basic app’s size from over 100 MB to under 1 MB in some cases. Its backend is written in Rust, which promotes both performance and memory safety, and it enforces more explicit boundaries for which OS-level features the app can access. This is appealing for teams that value security or simply can’t abide a big memory footprint. Tauri is still maturing, but it hints at an intriguing future: one where the convenience of “web tech on desktop” can coexist with smaller binaries and more efficient resource use.

As someone who has followed Electron from its Atom Shell days, I’m struck by its staying power despite these criticisms. For most organizations, time-to-market remains a more pressing concern than raw efficiency, so Electron will likely stay dominant in the near term. That said, the conversation is already shifting. Developers are growing more aware of the trade-offs between convenience and performance, and alternatives like Tauri are stepping up to challenge the status quo. Whether Electron retains its crown or cedes ground over the next few years, it has already changed how we think about desktop apps. It made cross-platform development feel intuitive - even fun - and that’s no small feat.