Felix Rieseberg
felixrieseberg.bsky.social
Felix Rieseberg
@felixrieseberg.bsky.social
Building Claude at @Anthropic, Co-maintainer @electronjs. Triathlete. Eats too much candy.
4) Bundle size does not matter to users. One hour of 4k Netflix ~7 GB, a typical Call of Duty update regularly clocks in more than 300 GB. I have not seen end users care about binary size in the 100s of MB more than they do about virtually anything else your engineering team could spend time on.
January 21, 2025 at 8:21 PM
3) Electron doesn't bundle Chromium because it somehow missed that operating systems come with built-in WebViews. It bundles Chromium because it's today's best stack for rendering web apps in a reliable, performant, secure, and stable way.
Why Electron | Electron
Electron is a framework enabling developers to build cross-platform desktop applications for macOS, Windows, and Linux by combining web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) with Node.js and native cod...
www.electronjs.org
January 21, 2025 at 8:21 PM
2) Web tech is *amazing* at displaying data and UI.

The Bloomberg Terminal, a system found at every financial institution, is written with JS/HTML and Chromium. It costs $25,000 per user, per year. The SpaceX’s Dragon 2 space capsule uses Chromium to display its interface.
January 21, 2025 at 8:21 PM
1) Electron doesn't pit JavaScript against native code. Its superpower is that you can mix and match between native and web technologies.

To show code, I've built examples using SwiftUI, GTK, Win32 Common Controls in Swift, ObjC, ObjC++, and C++: github.com/felixriesebe...
GitHub - felixrieseberg/electron-native-code-demos: Add native UI and code to your Electron apps
Add native UI and code to your Electron apps. Contribute to felixrieseberg/electron-native-code-demos development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
January 21, 2025 at 8:21 PM
But: People are wrong about very specific things. Below are the four the bother me the most - and if you like that in a single post, check out felixrieseberg.com/things-peopl....
Things people get wrong about Electron
From $25,000 Bloomberg Terminals to SpaceX spaceship controls, web tech is powering systems you'd never expect. Many desktop apps are built with Electron. Why build with web tech — and why bundle part...
felixrieseberg.com
January 21, 2025 at 8:21 PM
As an open source project, Electron never had to pitch. It's not like we'd make money off "another sale". I never took the time to write up the arguments for Electron. Why use web tech? Why bundle Chromium? Why Electron? The answer is now available at www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/....
Why Electron | Electron
Electron is a framework enabling developers to build cross-platform desktop applications for macOS, Windows, and Linux by combining web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) with Node.js and native cod...
www.electronjs.org
January 21, 2025 at 8:21 PM