Why we abandoned Electron

For two years our products shipped as Electron apps. It was the fastest way to get a cross-platform window on screen, and for a small team that mattered. But the bill came due every time a user opened Task Manager.

The weight of a browser

An Electron build bundles an entire Chromium runtime. That is roughly 150 MB of binary before you write a single line of product code.

Bundle size

Users notice downloads. A 180 MB installer for a text editor feels wrong, and they are right to complain.

Memory

Two apps, two Chromium instances, two garbage collectors fighting for RAM. On a laptop with 8 GB, the experience degraded fast.

What we ship instead

We moved to native frameworks (Rust + egui, C++ UI, and WinUI 3). The result:

• Installers dropped from ~180 MB to under 12 MB.
• Cold start went from seconds to instant.
• Memory footprint fell by an order of magnitude.

The trade-off

We gave up one codebase for three platforms. For a lab that cares about the machine as much as the user, it was the right call.