Electron Explained: Desktop Apps Built With Web Technology
Introduction Some of the most-used desktop apps — VS Code (the batch 17 post), Slack, Discord, Figma's desktop app — are not written in native desktop languages at all. They are web apps wrapped in Electron, GitHub's framework (released in 2013) that lets developers build desktop software with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. One codebase, three operating systems, and a team that already knows web development: that combination explains Electron's spread, and its controversies. Main process, renderer process, and the bridge between them Electron apps have two kinds of process. The main process (one per app, running Node.js) owns the operating system side: windows, menus, file access, and system trays. Each window runs a renderer process — essentially a Chromium browser tab — that displays the HTML interface and runs the frontend code. The two talk through inter-process communication (IPC): the renderer asks ("open a file dialog"), the main process acts and replies. A min...