I'm pretty sure this was known since the early days of Electron. It was even one of the chief complaints about VS Code when it was first launched.

Electron's value prop has always been about having one team producing one app that is supported on multiple platforms with minimal additional effort.

This article does nothing to address that.

Seeing all the defense of Electron in this page is a grim reminder that software developers so often lack the requisite empathy to actually be qualified to design software.

Anything with a UI is by definition made for the purpose of being used by a human. The use of Electron only makes sense from the perspective of preserving programmer man-hours, and it led to another generation of newer, faster computers dragged down to the speed of older, slower computers, and a wretched user experience.

Regardless: this is great news, I never thought Discord in particular would ever make a move like this.

I am at the opposite extreme. We should ditch electron and use browsers good enough integrated they can run all the apps with native feel and reusing the same engine (not a lacklustre OS webview but a complete one) This solves the memory overhead, solves unpatched or misconfigured chromium in each electron app as well as portability and reusing web dev skills. Also this would allow permissions and security to be managed by a layer that can focus on that and I don't have to worry about what a native app can do. (OS permissions and sandboxing are just not made for vibecoded infinite software and likely never will catch up) All the performance and other arguments are just not true, a well build webapp is often more performant than a native app especially for long scroll lists not even to mention accessibilty, extensions and more. I will never trust discord or Spotify to run something natively on my machine and so should no one else.

Electron is pretty awesome in that it allows a small team to build a decent GUI app using their existing web skillset but it also feels like it's time for something better at this point.

With the ram prices as crazy as they are. It's pretty frustrating to have to run multiple GB eating applications just to do some basic tasks (90% is read and write messages, in the case of Discord). I understand that other people might use the more advanced features (voice chat, etc) but these could be loaded on-demand.

It's a bit crazy to me that I can comfortable run an entire Linux stack (+ Podman, monitoring, alerting and multiple services) in 512 MB ram (with 40% free, just checked!). However my Windows PC needs 5.5GB just to show the desktop! Realistically it needs somewhere between 8GB and 16GB for some basic web browsing and even then it can feel slow if you have a few apps like Discord running in the background.

I don't understand the hate on Electron. I think most people here never shipped cross plattform apps ever and even less maintained them across cross platform. It's a financial decision. Electron (in the age before AI) enabled to stand on the shoulders of giants to build a reliable product with one code-base among many OSes. Something which Java promised Electron really delivered for most end-user apps. Google poured billions into making the fundament of Electron fast and reliable and bugfree. And it enabled many Linux ports of apps which would have otherwise not happened.

Best example is vscode.

Are Electron apps more wasteful than native: sure. But I rather stand with Electron and that Windows, Mac and Linux is supported.

Discord isn't really the model to follow here, IMO. They killed their native Android app and moved to React Native, and now they're dropping React Native (while mobile somehow keeps "native UI", according to their CTO's tweet). If they wanted to maximize code reuse and accelerate feature development, they should have instead considered Kotlin Multiplatform, then they could've skipped the React Native detour while actually building apps that are native to the platform. (Rust and its cacophony of UI frameworks are not really platform-native anywhere, as far as I'm aware. Maybe Pop OS, but I don't know anyone targeting that specifically.)

This bit is obviously subjective, but Rust as a language is simply not ergonomic enough for a lot of the use cases people are trying to apply it to, especially UI development. Most of the Rust UI libraries I've seen to date either use a more imperative style, or attempt to replicate more declarative approaches like Compose UI or SwiftUI, but without the nice language aesthetics that make it simple to read and write. And if the counter-argument there is for LLMs to be reading and writing this stuff, that's a whole other can of worms: (1) The subsidized inference era is quickly coming to an end and (2) if you're using LLMs anyway, why not maintain apps that are as native to each platform as possible?

One nice thing about Électron is that it supports accessbility and non-english IMEs correctly, and thus all Electron apps have decent accessibility out of the box, comparable to web apps.

Most Rust GUI toolkits, at least in 2025, did not have that good accessibility or IME: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...

Hopefully this has gotten better and the new discord client isn't worse in that regard.

People need to understand even a 70% smaller 290MB GUI app is still terrible. We could open 200 browser tabs on Windows 2000 with only 256MB memory back in the days. Discord should not consume more data than 200 browser tabs.

I don't understand this idiocracy - it's super easy (I did myself alone many times) to have a single codebase in Qt for all OSes, even BSDs.

I think people become super lazy... "Ah, it's will ocupie a few hundreds of RAM, no problem, let's ship it."

They are companies with billions or even trillions shipping shit with Electron.

I'm 100% on this since Electron is probably the worst thing that happened to the desktop development.

Hiwever, I'd like to hijack this front page article to for a related concern/question I've got.

It seems that all (popular) opensource LLM harnesses are either in JS or python (pi, hermes, opencode, paseo). The same seems to be true for closed source harnesses that I have used (deepseek, chatgpt).

I'd really like to ask why? I mean why somebody would use technologies like JS or python to implement a harness application instead of golang or rust or even C? I understand that before 1 year JS or python would be tempting but right now? Especially the LLm related companies have unlimited tokens and re-writing the harness software to golang or rust should be trivial.

This would benefit so many people (especiall considering the prices and scarcity of RAM these days).

So, why nobody does it? This is an honest question, I don't want to offend interpreted languages but it should be a universal truth that a compiled language is faster and consumes less ram.

We have gotten so used to slow app startup these days I believe. I have recently started using Task Slinger [1] and every single time I boot it, I get a feeling that it was already running and it's window just showed up. I wish all modern software were like this.

[1]: https://taskslinger.net/

I've rarely liked any Electron apps, both for the performance and because it seems to encourage a feeling of bloatedness, for want of a better word. Tried VS Code, but dropped it when they started putting too much AI in it and too much complexity. Sublime is so much better.

I don't know...there seems to be something unpleasant about all Electron apps.

I hope it's a tremendous success that inspires every app to rebuild native. We've been in the dark ages of desktop apps with 200ms click response times and 15hz rendering, 30 second load times despite having a super computer worth of hardware on every desktop.

Anyone who ran Windows 2k , or OS 9 remembers when apps opened instantly and were always responsive, because IO was dog slow (both disk & network access) -- no one dared to block the UI on an IO call.

Give us back our hardware!

I don’t doubt that this will be faster and smaller than the current app, but it’s slightly annoying to me that the new app is getting so much coverage with specific claims about speed and memory usage when it’s not actually feature-complete or released yet.

I have a few desktop applications at work that are written in C. They are fully launched before you lift your finger from the mouse click that started the app. There is so much bloat in today’s typical software.

Electron has always been about shipping cross-platform apps quickly, at the cost of higher memory usage and potentially worse performance. With or without LLMs, its core value proposition remains the same. LLMs simply amplify the framework’s existing strengths.

Raycast, originally a native macOS launcher, recently released v2 using a hybrid architecture. It’s not Electron, but it follows a similar approach to Spotify’s desktop app, using web technologies inside a native shell.

The memory usage is still pretty significant. It’s using around 350–450 MB at idle and can sometimes reach 1–2 GB depending on the workload. The upside is that they can now share most of their code across macOS and Windows and evolve beyond being just an app launcher.

It’s always been about trade-offs, and LLMs don’t fundamentally change that.

They keep talking about 2 accounts logged in so that's why it's still high. But they've done nothing to defend that claim.

Also, pro tip, you can still just use it in browser. I hope that doesn't go away.

Let’s hope we see a new wave of desktop apps rewritten natively, thanks to LLMs. Whether they use Rust with GPUI, C++ with Dear ImGui, or something else entirely, that would be great. Personally, I’m so fed up with bloated UIs. Windows is full of them, and it’s a pity considering how powerful our CPUs are.

Every time I start the discord app, it downloads updates. It was never the case when I opened discord app and it didn't start updating. Updating 7/13. Updating 1/4. There is always some update pushed, I think almost every day. Comparing the launch times of fully updated clients is kinda useless, as it will always take few minutes to update anyway when you are cold-starting it. Slow electron apps are just a skill issue. Yes it has a browser overhead, and it will use a bit more RAM, but the bare-minimum time required to spin up the underlying Chromium shell and Nodejs runtime environment is 100-300ms, everything on top of it is just application overhead aka skill issue. My slack client opens almost instantly all the time, and it's as responsive as any native application around, sometimes even greatly more responsive than some native apps made by Apple.

i believe that primary issue of electron is also that the framework consumes RAM/resources which is already a issue especially for windows which is a heavy OS on the RAM. the same side is visible on the Linux speciapic app ends of applications like VS code. they have poor integration , Loads of resource consumption and minimal polish

What I don't get is why most background electron/CEF applications don't unload the web engine when it's minimized to tray for some time. Chrome starts in about a second, the the webview shouldn't take more than that to re-initialize.

Well, why not just move on from Windows and transition to Linux, as I did with CachyOS earlier few days ago. Doesn't even want to look back on Windows now since everything is so smooth and uses half the memory I needed compared to the equivalent in Windows! The only quirk I have is the xe driver that after suspension and resume the GPU may go haywire and I have to restart SDDM but I switched from S3 to S2 sleep and the problem seems to be worked around. I'm using an Arc Pro B50 so not sure if that's buggy on Linux whatsoever but it is metric tons better in Windows.

If you ever wondered about the reasons people started using Telegram, this is a big part of why.

I really dont understand why when AI is available, big company still using electron for their apps. Codex was written in pure swift on macOS and right now moved to Electron again

Electron has it's value in the past time. It can definitely save a lot of develop time for desktop apps. But in AI era, Electron's value decreases dramatically. AI can generate code easily. If you are building a large app, you won't use it. If you are building a small app, you ask AI to generate one and won't use it either.

Electron / react native are dead. LLMs can do the porting over multiple platforms.

Just spend the tokens, the native app user experience improvements are worth the effort.

Is that a whole UI re-write in a native/non-web framework? Because in case that's not, this is still running in a browser, i.e. it stands at 80% or so of the bloat factor of electron, and what makes it faster is possibly (mainly?) that they haven't gotten yet to adding as much stuff as seen on the regular client.

Discord is a server-side protocol (the client isn't doing much besides displaying the server-prescribed state), there's very little logic/computation going on on there that should explain a world of difference.

Theres a small subset of apps where I still think electron can sort of be worth it, but its definitely never any of the always active or second monitor apps like we often end up seeing. I think an app you dont mind closing when youre done, and that doesnt expect or require to be run alongside other demandind apps, could potentially be worth building with Electron. But that is sadly not the category of apps that are often built with it.

Seeing this is still 234 MB (the .dmg for Apple silicon) I am not very sure what has changed. But then I stopped using Discord desktop years ago realising I need to access that service maybe once every few months when encountering some great companies, or some information source is blissfully only available on Discord – and I do that on the web just fine.

However having worked on few cross-platofrm apps, and that too within last few years, I have stopped blaming anyone for going Electron or React Native. Though I still won't use an Electron app, almost never – those are just that bad for a user. So I guess both can be okay at the same time.

Related:

Discord is ditching Electron and its new app uses less RAM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50378625

for a team that was using the underlying stack (other than the ui library) for other components, trying this is a low-hanging fruit of an experiment. this should not automatically become the recommendation for everybody. (yes i do hate electron apps)

for a large project like electron, it is up to the maintainers to optimize it while preserving the api. if they can do this with typescript, they can also explore this with electron. perhaps a native webview option instead of chromium?

with current memory crisis, devs with cushy performant laptops bought over a year ago should realize that we yet again have hardware constraints and need to act accordingly. however, putting the pressure at the wrong place is not as productive.

Would love to see VS Code ditch Electron

I’ve been building an app with Avalonia and it seems pretty snappy. Wonder why it’s not in the comparison.

Many people dislike Electron, but there's a reason it's still widely chosen. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. With C++ or C#, you have to build differently each time, and cross-platform support is difficult. And fundamentally, it brings over web syntax as-is more than other frameworks, making front-end styling convenient.

I'm well aware that Electron has a large RAM footprint and installation size, but doing a polyglot architecture instead puts more cognitive load on you. Projects that mix multiple languages are a pain just to manage. I'd rather hope Electron gets better optimized.

Great option for this that lets you use Rust along with real native UI for cross platform: https://github.com/redbadger/crux

I think the reason why web technologies that are essentially being ported to desktop is not only because they provide cross-platform compatibility (still lacking a standardization on Linux), but they tremendously helped the hustle culture built around the motto of "ship it fast" by providing the fastest iterations and benefiting from already existing cheap pool of web developers, especially via outsourcing/offshoring.

Nowadays, AI (LLMs, genAI, call it what you will) has become so cheap to handle more than one codebase, they no longer feel the need for web only approaches.

What are they using for the new web app? Is it just plain React now? How is the logic being transpiled to WebAssembly?

If Javascript wasn't such a terrible language web tech really could be the solution for most UI problems. Java and C# show the performance loss from JIT can be minimal, JS is just so awful that it prevents the reasonable optimizations Java uses.

I hope they can do some work on a11y because it's bed. Not as bad as it was but still slow and clunky to use with a screen reader.

The barrier to entry for GPUI might be a bit high for some, but is there really any argument to be made against migrating to Tauri?

It feels almost a certainty that they could have rewritten the thing as a new electron app instead, but concentrated on resource efficiency, and still showcased a huge improvement.

It's hard to say "Discord just showed why" before the product is in production and sees actual use. Promising initial statistics, but the transition is based on a lot of assumptions that won't really be proven until mass adoption and the software has seen long-term maintenance.

If LLMs are truly driving the cost of "writing code" down to zero, then we shouldn't need Electron anymore. The whining from developers about how it's soooooo hard to write and maintain N separate native applications is no longer valid. Point an LLM at your existing Electron code base and have it fork off a bunch of native ports of it. LLMs are surprisingly good at matching the functionality of existing software. Keep and maintain the Electron app as an internal reference design (your developers probably only know JavaScript anyway) and "build" all your actual production releases from that.

This gave me a good laugh. Like, who could have known?

There's absolutely no reason why a simple chat client should take more than a fraction of a second to start. If you need to fetch data from the web, just do it progressively. Not to mention that 290 MB is still way too much.

It's ridiculous how over the last 20 years simple apps became slower and slower while computers became faster and faster.

At the same time, REAPER (a full digital audio workstation) opens in less than a second.

These so-called software engineers seem to have completely lost the baseline of what is possible on modern computers. Or they just don't care.

Signal is still dragging Electron, can't have a working FreeBSD port due to dependency hell. Also VSCode.

One thing Electron has over Tauri for Discords case is WebRTC. I tried making an open source alternative using Tauri and got plenty far, then I learned that WebRTC on Linux is not OOTB since its still experimental. Webkit on Linux requires WebkitGTK, so everything under the sun out there that had “webviews” cross-platform cannot do WebRTC ootb.

At least now Discord will consume your GPU vram while you game.

    Discord’s new Rust client had its friends list loaded before the current Electron app could get past its loading screen, in a 15-second clip that we found on the X account of Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy. The video had 2.3 million views at the time of writing, and Discord employees have confirmed that both apps were launched from a cold start.

Just use the website. It's going to be a better experience than the vibecoded Rust approximation for the foreseeable future

For me the ugliest part of Electron is that it uses client-server model inside a program and includes both a browser and Node.JS. This is so stupid. If you love microservices so much why don't you put every React component in a separate process?

Also, browsers contain too much bloat, why do you need support for elements like "hr" or attributes like "cellpadding" in a modern app? Throw away all legacy garbage.

Also, immediate mode UIs (like Rust's egui) are even worse garbage than a browser. "Immediate mode" means that on every mouse move a function is run that re-draws whole window from scratch. I tried running PhotoCraft (uses egui) in a VM with no GPU and it felt like playing a game at 3 fps. The CPU is simply unable to redraw whole GUI with acceptable speed. It will be especially bad on 4K and 8K screens.

I also noticed that the "smoothness", when everything feels quicker, is immediately noticeable on desktop (vs laptop), all apps, several laptops (Mac, Thinkpad, Framework).

I literally just run another browser Window with discord on the web rather than the native app.

Discord is probably my least favorite thing to happen to chatting online, but for some reason it's what everyone wants to fucking use.

On another note, Microsoft Teams and new Outlook use very little amount of memory on paper, because their main windows show up under the Edge name. It’s a Microsoft way of solving the high ram usage problem.

"Discord just showed why", the Rust app is not even in public testing...

I would not add alternative accounts to the account switcher, they've used these to coordinate bans ever since the account switcher's inception.

Recently wrote a small tool for personal use that limits my CPU frequency so I can sleep better without loud fans in the next room, with the UI I wanted (e.g. set limit to 4.2GHz for 8 hours).

Made it in Wails cause it was the easiest for the UI. App needs 10 MB of RAM, whereas the WebView2 process needs about 100 MB of RAM.

I’m surprised that Chromium doesn’t have a low memory mode that disables all of the crap your local software doesn’t need. Frankly 20 MB I’d be fine with but this browser tech in its current form really adds up.

I wouldn’t care as much if I had more RAM, but can’t get more than 32 GB in this market in good faith.

Guess I gotta rewrite it in .NET with… something for the UI.

Yeah, native clients are pretty great. Why did you think people kept risking getting banned in order to use them?

AI;DR.

"Technology: Role in Discord | Not used" was most useless table in a while, that was when I noticed.

Discord just showed how low the bar is, if the new version in considered lean and fast.

Native night be more relevant than ever, considering the RAM prices.

I find it surprising that they are still investing in performance improvements, because to me for a while now it looked like discord has entered the enshitification stage of life, where they go purely for maximizing profits with no regard for user experience. As they had recently hit the news with their age verification requirements I thought that it's over for discord as they will start limiting the users and selling their data en masse.

Has this released yet? We're just going from self reported improvement right now?

Back in the day, Microsoft got into trouble for shipping a free browser together with its OS (https://xkcd.com/1118/). Somehow I wasn't expecting 'every app ships its own browser' to be the solution.

To be fair, multi-platform GUI development is _hard_ to do properly, just look at the differences between menu bars on Windows and Mac OS. In theory you could ship electron once as a dependency, similar to the various MSVC++ runtimes, but then you've reinvented 'dll hell'.

Any attempts to fix this probably end up with https://xkcd.com/927/

Vibe coded in Rust eh?

On my mac I’ve banned Electron apps, only native ones - Slack on Safari.

I've not seen the performance deficits demonstrated in this article. The article also does not discuss the specs.

Not to mention Windows is a very heavy slow inefficient and poorly made OS.

You don't see these issues generally on Linux or macOS.

I’m disappointed to see the continued proliferation of JavaScript and TypeScript. I cannot fathom why people are using these garbage languages still when we have so much better options and code is essentially free now.

we should kill web-monkeys.

So Discord rediscovered that native apps are faster? Until fairly recently, every proper desktop "app" was written in C/C++. In other news, water is wet.

Agreed, Electron is garbage.

Hot take, but: love electron. Write once, runs anywhere. The majority of bugs aren't platform specific. Easy to get nice visuals that stay consistent across different OS. Yes, it's not native. I don't care. It's not a painting to be admired. The focus on looks and visuals versus usability and ux is a plague.

Yeah, it takes some extra ram. Fork my stuff and rewrite it in rust if you care. I don't. The few hot spots can be fixed by using a lower level language. Is vs code not zippy enough? I certainly haven't noticed the slowness. People keep complaining about unnecessary load as if hardware hasn't progressed since 2004. It's hugely important for things like your OS. A few apps you run twice a month? Who cares.

But what about software used by billions, asks a person angry about my electron project used by thousands? How many ages were taken up by the five second startup time when you multiply that by however many users (all this time would be spent curing cancer of course)? Sure, improve performance when needed. For the vast majority of projects it's not needed. The average computer isn't pi zero.

This website could work much faster if it wasn’t loading 100s of ads.

Low effort article.

Rust to death i told them

Could they of used servo?

interesting, I would have guess Tauri. til GPUI

So, it has always been a skill issue.

Now I just need a matrix client that is this fast and actually supports most of the protocol

OR you can use Lazarus pascal and ship a 5mb application that uses 13Mb of RAM and runs everywhere instead of a 150MB installer that installs the nth multigb copy of the same application with different hat that leaves free 13Mb of RAM. https://github.com/alainnothere/mailBoy

Electron apps are a disease.

BUT BUT THEY LOOK GREAT, LOOKING GREAT SHOULD COST 1000$ OF RAM BUGA BUGA...

Don't worry I'm sure they'll find a way to make the rust based client crawl too soon enough.

Slapping a few million lines of AI generated slop code ought to do it for instance.

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I think this article is misleading, you can use any framework to make slow bloated software. A great thing about Electron and similar projects is that you get one codebase which is useable on many different platforms. An Electron application can easily be a website and PWA, then the user can choose what they prefer.

A good example fast / "performant" software which uses Electron is Obsidian.

Yes Electron isn't perfect, but I think it's a good choice for many situations. Same for Tauri, CapacitorJS, etc. Regardless of which is chosen, there should be an effort to make software performant and non-bloated.