People are too hard on Electron. Open Activity Monitor and you can see why: hundreds of megabytes for chat, another Chromium process for notes, another for code. The costs are real, but the process list leaves out what teams and users got in return.
Mocking Electron has become a cheap way to signal taste. Point at the process list, call the app a website, and the case seems closed. Calling it “bloated” closes the conversation before anyone counts what it replaced.
Electron bundles Chromium and Node.js so teams can build desktop applications with web technologies. Electron apps can be heavy. They include VS Code, Slack, Discord, Figma, Notion, and Obsidian. For much of the day, we live inside them.
Electron suffers from infrastructure amnesia. Once a technology becomes ordinary, the problems it solved fade into the background while every remaining flaw stays visible. Electron’s reach disappears into the software landscape. Its memory usage stays there in the task manager.
The bundled browser gives a team one known rendering engine instead of a different webview, version, and family of defects on every operating system. One team can reach several platforms without becoming several teams. Developers get one rendering model, browser DevTools, npm, and a large pool of people who already know how to build for the web. Electron turned that existing web stack into a desktop application platform.
“Bloat” counts what lands on a user’s machine. Users should not become a dumping ground for careless engineering, and memory, battery life, launch time, and disk space all matter. The same ledger should count duplicated implementations, platform drift, delayed releases, abandoned Linux versions, and applications that never become viable enough to exist. We can inspect Electron’s memory usage. We cannot open a task manager for the software that was never built.
Electron pays a browser tax to avoid a larger platform tax. A tiny, stable utility should not need Chromium around a handful of controls. The trade makes more sense for applications that behave like living environments: rich, collaborative, extensible, frequently updated, and expected to work the same way across operating systems.
A small company can support platforms it could not afford to build for separately. A developer can turn an idea into an application with tools they already know. Workplaces, creative practices, friendships, and communities end up inside the software that ships.
Calling Chromium “an entire browser” makes it sound like empty cargo. The bundle contains decades of work on rendering, international text, input, media, graphics, accessibility, sandboxing, security, and compatibility. It is large because the browser solves a large set of problems.
Replacing Electron remains difficult for the same reason. Tauri keeps the web stack but relies on each operating system’s webview, putting platform differences back on the table. Native renderers can use fewer resources and integrate more deeply with the operating system, but their teams must build tooling, primitives, accessibility, and developer familiarity. They reduce the browser tax by taking back work Electron bundled into Chromium.
OpenAI’s Web Layer, or OWL, puts Chromium behind an isolated service layer while SwiftUI and AppKit handle the Atlas interface. OpenAI’s account of the architecture says Chromium can start asynchronously, and a browser hang does not have to take down the native shell.
Atlas gives Chromium a narrower job. The application keeps Chromium’s rendering and compatibility work while moving lifecycle, failure isolation, and native interface concerns elsewhere.
Before I could code, applications such as Slack and VS Code helped me enter the world of software. I work closer to the machine now, but that does not make the interfaces that brought me here trivial. Experts often outgrow a bridge and forget who still needs to cross it.
I want lighter desktop applications with stronger native integration and better failure isolation. A credible successor still has to preserve the cross-platform reach that made Electron useful.