When Electron switched to Wayland on Linux last fall, most people didn't notice.

Major Linux distributions adopted the modern display protocol years ago, and both the KDE Plasma and GNOME desktop environments are in the process of dropping X11 support completely.

But a platform migration isn't complete without apps, and a large part of the Linux app ecosystem went through a second Wayland transition last August — well after most distros had changed their defaults. That's when Chromium turned on Wayland by default, bringing Electron and dozens of Linux desktop apps along with it.

The third impact: Electron goes Wayland-native​

Wayland is supported out of the box in Electron 38.2 and newer. As long as your apps are up-to-date, it just works. (If you were previously launching your Electron apps with very long commands like CONFUSING_OZONE_VARIABLE --ozone-platform=wayland, you no longer need to do that.)

This change was possible because the Chromium and Electron projects have been working on Wayland support for more than half a decade. But until recently, Chrome and Electron apps continued to use X11 by default, even when launched in a Wayland session. This wasn’t a big issue, since X11 apps still work fairly well on Wayland by running inside an invisible X server called Xwayland.

Running apps through a compatibility layer is not the same as running them directly on Wayland. On Wayland, there’s less sitting between your app and the compositor, so there's lower overhead and much stronger isolation between applications. Modern Wayland compositors also let apps take advantage of newer platform and display features like variable refresh rates, HiDPI and fractional scaling, and HDR.

These are all good reasons for Electron to make the switch. In late September, Electron followed Chromium’s lead and began defaulting to Wayland. And as apps began to update, people who had been “using Wayland” without issues for months or years started to find out what it was really like to experience their apps on Wayland for the first time.

Wayland’s house, Wayland’s rules​

Supporting Wayland required dozens of changes throughout Chromium and Electron, from internals to developer-facing APIs. It also required a different way of thinking about what desktop apps should be able to do.

Wayland reconsiders assumptions made by older systems and asks whether apps should be able to:

• Take focus away from other apps
• View and interact with windows from other apps
• Respond to mouse and keyboard input when not focused
• Choose where to position their own windows on the screen (and which physical monitor to appear on)
• Resize their windows at any time

Wayland's answer to these questions is essentially “no.” When you open a window, the compositor — not the app developer — decides where it goes. Apps cannot unilaterally move, resize, or focus their windows without user input, and they can only interact with the rest of the desktop through optional protocol extensions and XDG portals.

These kinds of rules are understandable; no one likes it when a misbehaving app steals focus or loads halfway off the screen. But it can still surprise people when their apps suddenly lose access to familiar affordances on Wayland. This is especially the case for a cross-platform framework like Electron, which exists to help developers achieve consistent results everywhere.

Some widely used Electron APIs that work on X11, macOS, and Windows are not available on Wayland. For example, win.setPosition(x, y) and screen.getCursorScreenPoint() aren't supported, as Wayland deliberately forbids apps from accessing global screen coordinates.

Other features work differently: recording the screen with desktopCapturer and setting keyboard shortcuts with globalShortcut are more restricted, and both heavily depend on the desktop environment and portal versions. Here's what it looks like when screen sharing in Signal Desktop on GNOME 48.

Making this more complicated for developers is the fact that Wayland isn't a single piece of software, but a protocol. Every compositor implements it a little differently, almost like browser engines. (There are even protocol support trackers that look like they came from MDN or CanIUse.)

So when Slack tries to focus its main window with win.focus(), GNOME's compositor (Mutter) shows a notification. On KDE Plasma (KWin), the app icon flashes in the panel instead. Neither outcome is what the app's developers had in mind, but both are valid interpretations of the activation spec.

Some capabilities simply work better on Wayland than on X11, including anything to do with colors, transparency, and hardware-accelerated rendering. win.setOpacity(n) is an example of an Electron API which hasn't been available on Linux in the past, but which will now be feasible to support.

Even the stricter restrictions can benefit apps. When 1Password runs on Wayland, its SSH agent lets users confirm requests with a single click instead of asking them to enter their passwords. This is safe because Wayland's input isolation is strong enough to prevent the prompt from being skipped with clickjacking — only a real human being can click the button.

The basic tradeoff is that Wayland restricts some of what apps can do but also enables them to be more capable and secure. And in one area, Wayland gives developers more flexibility and more responsibility than before: client-side decorations (CSD).

Understanding CSD, or when a window isn’t a window​

The Wayland protocol is very lightweight, and its simplicity extends to the way it draws window frames. On X11, the window manager typically supplies a window’s title bar and frame decorations. But when you create a window (xdg_toplevel) on Wayland, all you get back from the compositor is a plain rectangle.

That rectangle is a powerful canvas. On a modern compositor like GNOME’s Mutter, it’s triple-buffered and GPU-accelerated. But if you want any of the trimmings users might expect — title bar buttons, drop shadows, even resize handles — you have to add them yourself. This requirement is called client-side decorations (CSD), and it’s one of the major differences between X11 and Wayland.

Electron already had some support for client-side decorations, provided by a class called ClientFrameViewLinux which uses GTK to paint convincing native window frames. These look very similar to the ones GNOME used to supply on X11, but they are produced entirely in-framework.

But client-side window frames are not an exact match for server-side decorations (SSD) from X11 window managers. They need to be implemented by each app or framework, so the details can look noticeably different when you put apps side by side, from their title bar areas right down to their drop shadows and corner shapes.

The differences are usually minor, but when CSD is completely absent from a window, the result can be visually jarring.

Many popular apps, including Visual Studio Code, Obsidian, and Discord, use frameless windows with custom title bars. Prior to Electron 41, frameless windows did not support CSD at all, so they looked like featureless rectangles on Wayland.

Improving coverage for CSD was a task with framework-wide consequences. The biggest obstacle involved window sizes and how to measure and set them accurately. Electron already manages two different kinds of window boundaries:

• “window bounds”, the size of the window, including its titlebar, menubar, and frame.
• “content bounds”, the size of the internal web view which hosts the app’s web content.

Both values can be controlled independently. If a developer calls for an 800x600 window, Electron calculates the height of the title bar and shrinks the web app to something like 800x540. (It also works the other way around for content-sized windows.)

To support CSD, Electron also needed to keep track of a new kind of boundary:

• “widget bounds”, the size of the transparent widget which draws everything inside of it, including the window frame and its external decorations.

When CSD is required, Electron first takes the window's underlying surface (accessed internally via a Chromium accelerated widget) and inflates it so it's large enough to fit all the decorations.

The framework then paints the opaque bits of the window (title bar, frame, and web content) at their appropriate sizes and positions inside the transparent widget. The outermost areas are filled in with drop shadows and resize hit targets, creating the look and feel of a native, three-dimensional window without relying on server-side decorations.

With CSD, a "logical" window at 800x600 might be inset into a 840x640 widget. The exact geometries depend on the user's theme and the window's state: whether it is currently active, maximized, tiled, or fullscreen can affect the size and presence of decorations.

Of course, widget bounds should never leak into the public API. The framework needs to abstract this complexity away from app developers, who are generally not thinking about the extents of resize targets or shadow insets changing underneath them.

The good news is that much of this was sorted out between last September and March, and as a result, Electron 41 supports CSD on Wayland in all window configurations, including frameless windows with Window Controls Overlay.

What’s next — and how you can help​

Wayland is an everyday reality for Linux users in 2026, so a great Wayland experience is now just what it means to support Linux.

Electron reached an important milestone last month with the creation of a Wayland test job in CI. More tests still need to be ported over, but it’s now much easier to catch regressions.

Now that the basic support is in place, Wayland opens up new possibilities for Electron apps. CSD in particular offers developers more ways to customize window frames and integrate them with both their web content and the platform. Let us know what you'd like to see; one feature that's high on my own shortlist is rounded corners.

The framework is only part of the story. If you develop an Electron app and you haven’t thoroughly tested it on Linux in a while (even as recently as last fall), give it a spin with Electron 41+ on a modern distribution like Ubuntu 25.10 or Fedora 43. Try your app on both KDE Plasma and GNOME, and maybe something more exotic like Niri.

You may discover changes you could make to accommodate Wayland's unique constraints. Some differences are covered in the Electron documentation, but the best way to understand the new environment is to use it.

And if you’d like to see faster progress and support for more platform features, consider becoming a contributor. Like Linux itself, Electron is a community-run free software project that’s open to everyone, and we're actively looking for Linux contributors and maintainers.

Electron powers many of the most popular desktop apps across platforms, so getting involved is an effective way to help make desktop Linux more viable for millions of people.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 41! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

ASAR Integrity digest for improved security​

As of Electron 41, macOS Electron apps can now embed a digest of their ASAR Integrity information. This adds an additional layer of tamper detection for apps that use ASAR Integrity by validating the integrity information itself at app launch.

To enable the feature for your app, you can run the following command with @electron/asar v4.1.0 and above:

asar integrity-digest on /path/to/YourApp.app

You must re-sign your app afterwards. For more information, see the @electron/asar CLI documentation.

Support for this feature in Electron Forge is planned for the near future (electron/forge#4159).

Improved Wayland support​

On Wayland (Linux), frameless windows now have drop shadows and extended resize boundaries. To create fully frameless windows with no decorations, set hasShadow: false in the window constructor. #49885

Mitchell Cohen is writing a blog article about recent work to improve Electron's support of Wayland and client-side decorations on Linux. Watch this space!

Added support for MSIX auto-updating​

The Electron team recently added MSIX auto-updater support according to RFC #21. You can now ship both MSIX and Squirrel.Mac in your update server essentially with the same JSON response format. See the autoUpdater documentation for more information.

This was added in Electron 41 by #49586 and has also been backported to Electron 39.5.0 (#49585) and 40.2.0 (#49587).

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 146.0.7680.65

  • New in 146
  • New in 145

• Node v24.14.0

  • Node 24.14.0 blog post
  • Node 24.13.1 blog post
  • Node 24.13.0 blog post
  • Node 24.12.0 blog post

• V8 14.4

  • V8 roll increment

Electron 41 upgrades Chromium from 144.0.7559.60 to 146.0.7680.65, Node.js from v24.11.1 to v24.14.0, and V8 from 14.4 to 14.6.

New Features and Improvements​

• Added --disable-geolocation command-line flag for macOS apps to disable location services. #45934
• Added NV12 support for import shared texture. #48922 ^{(Also in 40)}
• Added a disclaim option to the utilityProcess API to allow for TCC disclaiming on macOS. #49693 ^{(Also in 39, 40)}
• Added a reason property to the Notification 'closed' event on Windows to allow developers to know the reason the notification was dismissed. #50029 ^{(Also in 40)}
• Added an usePrinterDefaultPageSize option to webContents.print() to allow using the printer's default page size. #49812
• Added support for WebSocket authentication through the login event on webContents. #48512 ^{(Also in 39, 40)}
• Added support for the Node.js --experimental-transform-types flag. #49882 ^{(Also in 39, 40)}
• Added support for long-animation-frame script attribution (via --enable-features=AlwaysLogLOAFURL). #49773 ^{(Also in 39, 40)}
• Added the ability to disable auto-focusing of WebContents on navigation using webPreferences.focusOnNavigation. #49511 ^{(Also in 40)}
• Irrelevant errors from the Chromium DevTools frontend are now silenced in the main process. #49292 ^{(Also in 40)}
• Enable V8 trap handlers for WASM behind WasmTrapHandlers fuse. #49839
• Extended actions support for Windows notifications to include buttons, select dropdowns, and replies. #49787 ^{(Also in 40)}

Breaking Changes​

Behavior Changed: PDFs no longer create a separate WebContents​

Previously, PDF resources created a separate guest WebContents for rendering. Now, PDFs are rendered within the same WebContents instead. If you have code to detect PDF resources, use the frame tree instead of WebContents.

Under the hood, Chromium enabled a feature that changes PDFs to use out-of-process iframes (OOPIFs) instead of the MimeHandlerViewGuest extension.

Behavior Changed: Updated Cookie Change Cause in the Cookie 'changed' Event​

We have updated the cookie change cause in the cookie 'changed' event. When a new cookie is set, the change cause is inserted. When a cookie is deleted, the change cause remains explicit. When the cookie being set is identical to an existing one (same name, domain, path, and value, with no actual changes), the change cause is inserted-no-change-overwrite. When the value of the cookie being set remains unchanged but some of its attributes are updated, such as the expiration attribute, the change cause will be inserted-no-value-change-overwrite.

End of Support for 38.x.y​

Electron 38.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron. See https://releases.electronjs.org/schedule to see the timeline for supported versions of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 40.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 144.0.7559.60

  • New in 144
  • New in 143

• Node v24.11.1

  • Node 24.11.1 blog post

• V8 14.4

  • V8 roll increment

Electron 40 upgrades Chromium from 142.0.7444.52 to 144.0.7559.60, Node.js from v22.20.0 to v24.11.1, and V8 from 14.2 to 14.4.

New Features and Improvements​

• Added "memory-eviction" as a possible reason for a child process to exit. #48362
• Added bypassCustomProtocolHandlers option to net.request. #48883 ^{(Also in 38, 39)}
• Added support to import external shared texture as VideoFrame. #48831
• Automatically focus DevTools when element is inspected or breakpoint is triggered. #46386 ^{(Also in 37, 38, 39)}
• Enabled resetting accent color to follow system accent settings if a previous color has been set via window.setAccentColor(null). #48274 ^{(Also in 38, 39)}
• Updated nativeImage.createFromNamedImage to support SF Symbol names. #48772 ^{(Also in 39)}

Breaking Changes​

Deprecated: clipboard API access from renderer processes​

Using the clipboard API directly in the renderer process is deprecated. If you want to call this API from a renderer process, place the API call in your preload script and expose it using the contextBridge API.

Behavior Changed: macOS dSYM files now compressed with tar.xz​

Debug symbols for macOS (dSYM) now use xz compression in order to handle larger file sizes. dsym.zip files are now dsym.tar.xz files. End users using debug symbols may need to update their zip utilities.

End of Support for 37.x.y​

Electron 37.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

Recently, I worked on improving Electron and Chromium's window resize behavior.

The bug​

We were seeing an issue on Windows where old frames would become visible while resizing a window:

What made this bug particularly interesting?​

1. It was challenging.
2. It was deep in a large codebase.
3. As you'll see later, there were two different bugs under the hood.

Fixing the bug​

With a bug like this, the first challenge is figuring out where to start looking.

Electron builds upon Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome. When compiling Electron, Electron's source code is added into the Chromium source tree as a subdirectory. Electron then relies on Chromium's code to provide most of the functionality of a modern browser.

Chromium has about 36 million lines of code. Electron is a large project, too. That is a lot of code that could be causing this issue.

Narrowing down the root cause​

I did a lot of experimentation.

First, I noticed that the issue occurred in Google Chrome, too:

This suggested that the issue was likely in Chromium, not in Electron.

Additionally, the issue was not visible on macOS. That suggested that it was in Windows-specific source code.

The crucial lead​

I tried a lot of different command line flags and configuration options.

I noticed that app.disableHardwareAcceleration() fixed the issue. Without hardware acceleration, the issue was gone.

Here is some context: Chromium supports various different graphics APIs for showing pixels on screen (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, and more). On Windows, it uses different graphics APIs than on macOS or Linux. Even on Windows, Chromium can work with multiple different graphics backends.

Which graphics backend Chromium uses depends on the user's hardware. For example, some graphics backends require the computer to have a GPU.

I tried various graphics backends and noticed that the following flags fixed the issue:

• --use-angle=warp
• --use-angle=vulkan
• --use-gl=desktop
• --use-gl=egl
• --use-gl=osmesa
• --use-gl=swiftshader

The following flags reproduced the issue:

• --use-angle=d3d11 (this is currently the default on Windows)
• --use-angle=gl (falls back to Direct3D 11 on Windows, see chrome://gpu/)

None of the working flags were good enough to be used as the default in Electron apps on Windows. They were either too slow or lacked broad driver support.

However, these workarounds pointed me into the right direction. They showed that the issue was in a code path that was only used with the ANGLE Direct3D 11 backend.

Direct3D is a Windows API for hardware-accelerated graphics.

ANGLE is a library that translates OpenGL calls into calls to the native graphics API of the given operating system, here Direct3D. ANGLE allows Chromium developers to write OpenGL calls on all platforms. ANGLE then translates them into Direct3D, Vulkan, or Metal API calls, depending on which graphics API is used.

Locating the relevant Chromium component​

Chromium references Direct3D in tens of thousands of places. It wasn't realistic to go through all of them.

By chance, I stumbled across a few helpful debugging flags in the Chromium source code:

• --ui-show-paint-rects
• --ui-show-property-changed-rects
• --ui-show-surface-damage-rects
• --ui-show-composited-layer-borders
• --tint-composited-content
• --tint-composited-content-modulate
• (And more)

They highlight areas of the browser window that were redrawn or updated by different parts of the Chromium graphics stack.

That allowed me to see which part of the graphics stack was producing which output.

In particular, the combination of --tint-composited-content and --tint-composited-content-modulate was really helpful. The former adds a tint to the output of the compositor. The latter changes the tint color on every frame.

In the screenshot, the cyan-tinted frame was the last frame that was being drawn.

The jank to the right of that frame was not tinted cyan. It was tinted in different colors that were still there from previous frames. This indicated that the jank was not coming from the compositor. The compositor was sending the right output.

The compositor is part of Chromium's graphics stack. The following is very simplified, but for the purpose of this blog post you can imagine it like this:

1. The compositor cc produces a CompositorFrame, which contains draw instructions.
2. cc sends that CompositorFrame to the display compositor viz.
3. viz then draws the frame and shows it on screen.

Tinting each CompositorFrame showed that the compositor produced the right output. So the issue had to be in the display compositor viz.

Locating the relevant viz code​

From there, I started searching for mentions of Direct3D in the viz source code.

Note: From here on, the post will get a bit more technical and reference source code symbols.

I found that on the ANGLE Direct3D 11 backend, Chromium uses the Windows DirectComposition API for drawing the window contents.

Chromium's DirectComposition OutputSurface differs from most other output surfaces in Chromium. It has the capability supports_viewporter (source link 1, source link 2).

An output surface is a bitmap that can be drawn to, often backed by a GPU texture.

Without supports_viewporter, whenever the window size changes, Chromium will create a new output surface matching the new window size. Then it will draw on that surface and show it.

supports_viewporter tries to reduce these costly surface allocations. With supports_viewporter, Chromium will not allocate a new surface on every resize. Instead, it will allocate a surface that is too large for what we need to draw. Then it will only paint to and show a certain sub-rectangle (the "viewport") of that surface on screen. The other parts of the surface are not supposed to be shown on screen.

This is supposed to make resizing more efficient because all Chromium needs to do is pad the surface to the proper width and height instead of allocating a new surface on every resize. This surface resize logic lives in direct_renderer.cc.

Here's what that looks like:

Let me explain:

• The blue rectangle is our surface.
• The green area is our viewport, i.e., the area of the surface that is supposed to be visible and that we actively draw to.
• The red rectangle is our clip rect(angle), i.e., the part of the surface that is actually being shown on screen.

As a performance optimization, only the viewport (the green area) is repainted when we get a new frame. The rest is left unchanged. This is important. We only ever repaint the green viewport. We don't update the areas outside of the viewport.

When we resize the window, what's supposed to happen is that in an atomic transaction (= at the exact same time) we repaint the viewport (= the area that's supposed to be visible on screen) and then update the clip rect to clip the surface to the new viewport size.

After the resize, it should look like this:

And that's where we get to the first of our two bugs.

First bug​

Sometimes these operations can get out of sync. For example, the clip rect might get updated before the viewport is repainted. Then we get a result like this:

We still show the old frame in the green viewport. But the clip rect has become larger and we show areas of the surface that we haven't repainted yet.

On the first resize of a window, these areas would be black. On the second resize, those areas would be filled with old pixel values. They would show whatever we had previously painted in those areas.

Similarly, in a certain edge case while making the window smaller, we would sometimes repaint the viewport before we would update the clip rect.

Then parts of the clip rect would still show the previous frame because the new frame was smaller and we did not repaint any areas beyond the new viewport.

Now why do these operations not happen in sync?

We use two different Windows APIs here:

• IDXGISwapChain1::Present1 — This shows the new pixels on screen / updates the new viewport.
• IDCompositionDevice::Commit — This updates the clip rect.

Here's what's important to understand: both functions return synchronously on the CPU. However, they schedule tasks that run asynchronously on the GPU at a later time. Windows and its services (such as DWM) decide when these tasks will run and in which order. So they take effect asynchronously, and not always within the same frame.

Unfortunately, Windows provides no way for us to synchronize those operations. So I had to find other approaches to fix this.

There were two options that I evaluated with the Chromium maintainers:

1. While resizing, paint all previously drawn areas outside of the viewport transparent. This makes those areas invisible. It fixes the artifacts.
2. While resizing, switch from an IDXGISwapChain1 to a DirectComposition surface which synchronizes updates with IDCompositionDevice::Commit. This also fixes the artifacts.

We went with the first option because it leads to faster resizes than the second option.

I landed a patch in Chromium that implemented that first solution.

I also submitted two other patches in preparation for the main patch:

1. The first one fixed a bug in existing code that would make CI fail in combination with the main patch. It also made launching Electron apps and Chrome a tiny bit faster.
2. The second one was split off to make code review easier on the main patch.

Second bug​

In addition to this first bug, there was a second bug which also led to stale pixels.

Here's what was going on there:

When the user resizes the window, Chromium needs to redraw the contents of the window for the new window size. This takes some time. The new frame isn't ready immediately.

Here's a sequence of frames that demonstrates this:

At a certain time during the resize, Windows tells us: "The window is 1,000 pixels wide." But the frames that the browser compositor produces are lagging behind. The last frame that we have painted might be 600 pixels wide.

Historically, Chromium used to skip frames where the width of the window did not match the width of the frame that it last painted. It would decide to just not update the window.

However, that would often lead to the window contents not being updated at all until the resize operation was finished.

So in 2015 someone decided: "Why not show these frames? They might not match the window size perfectly, but at least we can show something."

It would lead to gutter, but at that time the gutter was black. So that was better than the previous implementation.

Now, 10 years later with DirectComposition, that gutter was often filled with stale pixels.

Let's look at what was happening there:

Every frame consists of multiple render passes. These render passes represent the various things that should be drawn on screen. From complicated bitmaps to rectangles filled with solid colors.

Every frame has a root render pass, which contains all other render passes and glues them together. (Render passes are arranged in a tree structure and the root render pass is the root of that tree.)

So now during a resize, we'd get to a point where we know the window is 1,000 pixels wide. Accordingly, we'd adjust the viewport of our output surface to also be 1,000 pixels wide. But the frame that we just received is only 600 pixels wide.

The optimization from 2015 would then go and change the width of the root render pass to also be 1,000 pixels. But it wouldn't change what the render passes would actually draw on screen. They'd still only contain instructions to draw a picture that is 600 pixels wide.

Here's what that would look like:

The yellow area is the area in which the render passes of the frame actually drew something. It's 600 pixels wide.

However, our green viewport and our red clip rect are 1,000 pixels wide. That's the area that we show on screen. (After all, the width attribute of the root render pass claimed that it would redraw the full area of 1,000 pixels.)

But because we had no draw instructions for the 400 pixels on the right, those areas didn't get updated.

On the first resize, we'd show black pixels there. (That's the color that we initialize the surface with.)

On subsequent resizes, those areas would show whatever was drawn to them before. We'd see stale pixels.

I landed a fix for this issue in crrev.com/c/7156576.

The fix changes what we do when we receive a frame with a different size than our window. Instead of resizing the frame and adding gutter that contains stale pixels, we resize our viewport and our clip rect.

We clip our surface to the size of the frame that we received. We don't show anything beyond the 600 pixels that we have draw instructions for.

Voilà, no more gutter, no more stale pixels!

Backporting the patches to Electron​

Once the fixes made it into Chromium, we had to pull them into Electron, too.

On the main branch, Electron updates its Chromium version constantly. As a result, the patches were merged into main in a Chromium roll PR.

However, commits that make it into main right now will only be included in an Electron release in about three months. Our existing release and pre-release branches run on older Chromium versions.

Thus, the next step was to backport the patches to Electron 39 and Electron 40.

Electron keeps a list of Chromium patches in the patches/chromium directory. When we backport a Chromium patch, we add it there. When building Electron, these patches are applied to the Chromium source code.

(In general, we try to keep the number of Chromium patches low. Every patch can lead to merge conflicts during Chromium updates. The maintenance burden from patches is real.)

The Electron 39 backport PR was merged pretty quickly. The fix became part of Electron 39.2.6. 🎉

If you resize a window on Electron 39.2.6 or later, you'll see no more stale pixels.

(The patches are also part of Google Chrome Canary. They should be part of a stable Google Chrome release in February 2026.)

Thanks​

Big thanks to Plasticity for funding this work!

Thanks to Michael Tang and Vasiliy Telezhnikov from the Chromium team for their help.

Final thoughts​

This was the hardest bug I have ever worked on (and I have worked on many hard bugs in 18 years of writing software).

But it was also one of the most fun projects I have ever worked on.

If you found this interesting, please consider contributing to Electron! We love seeing new faces.

Since 2020, December has been a time for project maintainers to take a breather from regular maintenance duties in order to take a break or focus on heads-down work. This break helps us rest up and come back energized for the year to come.

That said, a month-long pause like this one is only achievable when an open-source project is in a healthy state—we’d like to thank all maintainers and external contributors for all of their continued efforts to keep the project moving. ❤️

2025 in review​

As we close out the year, we’d like to highlight some of the projects we’ve accomplished. Here are some things we were proud of in 2025:

• ⚛️ Shipped 6 new major versions of Electron in tandem with every other Chromium major version.
• 🌿 Migrated Electron’s build tooling from Ninja to Chromium’s new siso build system, which adds native remote execution support.
• ✨ Revamped the releases.electronjs.org page with a fresh new design.
• ✅ Accepted four new RFCs and implemented two others into electron/electron.
• ☀️ Completed two new Google Summer of Code projects:
  • The Devtron DevTools IPC tracker Extension is now available via npm install --save-dev @electron/devtron.
  • The Save/Restore Window State API for Electron’s BaseWindow module was accepted as an RFC and is awaiting its final merge in Electron core.
• 📦 Released modernized major versions for all @electron/ npm packages as ECMAScript modules requiring at least Node 22.
• 🔒 Moved package publishing from Continuous Auth to the new token-less OIDC-based trusted publishing system in light of security incidents in the npm ecosystem.
• 🧑‍💻 Onboarded five new maintainers who help us ship great software every day and keep the project running long-term.

Thanks for a great year, and see you in 2026!

Quiet period policies​

Not much has changed from previous years, but we changed some of the wording around issue and pull request reviews to temper expectations but allow maintainers to continue to engage with the project as much as they want.

What will be the same in December​

1. Zero-day and other major security-related releases will be published as necessary. Security incidents should be reported via the escalation policy outlined in the SECURITY.md document.
2. Code of Conduct reports and moderation will continue.

What will be different in December​

1. The last stable branch releases of the year for Electron 37, 38, and 39 will occur on the week of December 1st. There will be no additional planned releases in December.
2. There will be no nightly, alpha and beta releases for the last two weeks of December.
3. Regular Working Group meetings will be paused.
4. Issue triage may be delayed.
5. Pull request reviews and merges may be delayed.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 39.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

ASAR Integrity graduates to stable​

A long-standing "experimental" feature -- ASAR integrity -- is now stable in Electron 39. When you enable this feature, it validates your packaged app.asar at runtime against a build-time hash to detect any tampering. If no hash is present or if there is a mismatch in the hashes, the app will forcefully terminate.

See the ASAR integrity documentation for full information on how on the feature works, on how to use it in your application, and how to use it in Electron Forge and Electron Packager.

In related news, Electron Packager v19 now enables ASAR by default. #1841

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 142.0.7444.52
  • New in 142
  • New in 141
• Node 22.20.0
  • v22.20.0 Announcement
  • v22.19.0 Announcement
• V8 14.2
  • V8 roll increment

Electron 39 upgrades Chromium from 140.0.7339.41 to 142.0.7444.52, Node.js from 22.18.0 to v22.20.0, and V8 from 14.0 to 14.2.

New Features and Improvements​

• Added app.isHardwareAccelerationEnabled(). #48680
• Added RGBAF16 output format with scRGB HDR color space support to Offscreen Rendering. #48504
• Added methods to enable more granular accessibility support management. #48625
• Added support for USBDevice.configurations. #47459
• Added the ability to retrieve the system accent color on Linux using systemPreferences.getAccentColor. #48628
• Allowed for persisting File System API grant status within a given session. #48326 ^{(Also in 37, 38)}
• Support dynamic ESM imports in non-context isolated preloads. #48488 ^{(Also in 37, 38)}
• Marked the ASAR integrity feature as stable. It had previously been experimental. #48434

Breaking Changes​

Deprecated: --host-rules command line switch​

Chromium is deprecating the --host-rules switch.

You should use --host-resolver-rules instead.

Behavior Changed: window.open popups are always resizable​

Per current WHATWG spec, the window.open API will now always create a resizable popup window.

To restore previous behavior:

webContents.setWindowOpenHandler((details) => {
  return {
    action: 'allow',
    overrideBrowserWindowOptions: {
      resizable: details.features.includes('resizable=yes'),
    },
  };
});

Behavior Changed: NSAudioCaptureUsageDescription should be included in your app's Info.plist file to use desktopCapturer (🍏 macOS ≥14.2)​

Due to a Chromium update which enables Apple's newer CoreAudio Tap API by default, you now must have NSAudioCaptureUsageDescription defined in your Info.plist to use desktopCapturer.

Electron's desktopCapturer will create a dead audio stream if the new permission is absent. However, no errors or warnings will occur. This is partially a side-effect of Chromium not falling back to the older Screen & System Audio Recording permissions system if the new system fails.

To restore previous behavior:

//main.js (right beneath your require/import statments)
app.commandLine.appendSwitch(
  'disable-features',
  'MacCatapLoopbackAudioForScreenShare',
);

Behavior Changed: shared texture OSR paint event data structure​

When using the shared texture offscreen rendering feature, the paint event now emits a more structured object. It moves the sharedTextureHandle, planes, modifier into a unified handle property. See the OffscreenSharedTexture documentation for more details.

End of Support for 36.x.y​

Electron 36.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 38.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 140.0.7339.41
  • New in 140
  • New in 139
• Node 22.18.0
  • Node 22.18.0 blog post
• V8 14.0
  • V8 roll increment

Electron 38 upgrades Chromium from 138.0.7204.35 to 140.0.7339.41, Node from 22.16.0 to 22.18.0, and V8 from 13.8 to 14.0.

New Features and Improvements​

• Added support for customizing system accent color and highlighting of active window border. #47285 (Also in 37)
• Added fileBacked and purgeable fields to process.getSystemMemoryInfo() for macOS. #48146 (Also in 37)
• Added support for guid Tray constructor option on macOS to allow tray icons to maintain position across launches. #48077 (Also in 37)
• Added webFrameMain.fromFrameToken(processId, frameToken) to get a WebFrameMain instance from its frame token. #47942
• Added support for app.getRecentDocuments() on Windows and macOS. #47924 (Also in 37)
• Internally switched to using DIR_ASSETS instead of DIR_MODULE/DIR_EXE to locate assets and resources, and added "assets" as a key that can be queried via app.getPath. #47950 (Also in 37)
• Fixed an issue where dialog.showMessageDialog showed a window incorrectly centered to monitor instead of parent window when passed. #48215
• Fixed an issue where users on macOS were unable to interact with a webpage loaded via loadURL. #47575

Breaking Changes​

Removed: macOS 11 support​

macOS 11 (Big Sur) is no longer supported by Chromium.

Older versions of Electron will continue to run on Big Sur, but macOS 12 (Monterey) or later will be required to run Electron v38.0.0 and higher.

Removed: ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT environment variable​

The default value of the --ozone-platform flag changed to auto.

Electron now runs as a native Wayland app by default when launched in a Wayland session on Linux. Some features and APIs behave differently in Wayland and X11. You can force Electron to run in X11 compatibility mode (Xwayland), like it did in older versions, by appending the flag --ozone-platform=x11.

Removed: plugin-crashed event​

The plugin-crashed event has been removed from webContents.

Deprecated: webFrame.routingId property​

The routingId property will be removed from webFrame objects.

You should use webFrame.frameToken instead.

Deprecated: webFrame.findFrameByRoutingId(routingId)​

The webFrame.findFrameByRoutingId(routingId) function will be removed.

You should use webFrame.findFrameByToken(frameToken) instead.

Google Summer of Code Concludes​

Our two Google Summer of Code contributors have just completed their summer projects!

• @nilayarya crafted a new Save/Restore Window State API in Electron core. The new APIs will provide a built-in, standardized way to handle window state persistence. See Nilay's original RFC at electron/rfcs#16.
• @hitarth-gg put a lot of hard work into modernizing the long-dormant Devtron extension using Chrome Manifest V3 APIs. This project provides tooling for developers to debug IPC communication, track event listeners, and visualize module dependencies in their Electron applications.

Stay tuned for a more detailed blog post outlining their projects and the outcomes.

End of Support for 35.x.y​

Electron 35.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 37.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Google Summer of Code Begins​

Our two Google Summer of Code contributors have started the program's coding period!

• @nilayarya is crafting a new Save/Restore Window State API in Electron core. The new APIs will provide a built-in, standardized way to handle window state persistence. See Nilay's in-progress RFC at electron/rfcs#16.
• @hitarth-gg is hard at work modernizing the long-dormant Devtron extension using Chrome Manifest V3 APIs. This project will provide tooling for developers to debug IPC communication, track event listeners, and visualize module dependencies in their Electron applications.

It has been an exciting couple of weeks for our GSOC participants, so stay tuned for more updates!

Notable Changes​

Smooth Corners: Native CSS Squircles​

Electron 37 introduces the custom -electron-corner-smoothing CSS property, which allows apps to create smoother rounded corners to match Apple's macOS design language. This feature originally landed in Electron 36, but we felt like it deserved a brighter spotlight.

Example with 100% Corner Smoothing

Code	Result
.box { width: 128px; height: 128px; border-radius: 24px; -electron-corner-smoothing: 100%; }

Unlike the standard border-radius property, which carves quarter-circle corners out of a rectangle, -electron-corner-smoothing smoothly transitions the curve into a squircle shape with a continuous perimeter.

You can adjust the smoothness using values from 0% to 100%, or use the system-ui value to match the operating system's style (60% on macOS and 0% otherwise). This design enhancement can be applied on borders, outlines, and shadows, giving your app a subtle layer of polish.

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 138.0.7204.35
  • New in 138
  • New in 137
• Node 22.16.0
  • Node 22.16.0 blog post
• V8 13.8

Electron 37 upgrades Chromium from 136.0.7103.48 to 138.0.7204.35, and V8 from 13.6 to 13.8.

New Features and Improvements​

• Added innerWidth and innerHeight options for window.open. #47039 (Also in 35, 36)
• Added before-mouse-event to allow intercepting and preventing mouse events in webContents. #47364 (Also in 36)
• Added scriptURL property to ServiceWorkerMain. #45863
• Added sublabel functionality for menus on macOS >= 14.4. #47042 (Also in 35, 36)
• Added support for HIDDevice.collections. #47483 (Also in 36)
• Added support for --no-experimental-global-navigator flag. #47418 (Also in 35, 36)
• Added support for screen.dipToScreenPoint(point) and screen.screenToDipPoint(point) on Linux X11. #46895 (Also in 35, 36)
• Added support for menu item role palette and header on macOS. #47245
• Added support for node option --experimental-network-inspection. #47031 (Also in 35, 36)
• Exposed win.isContentProtected() to allow developers to check window protection status. #47310 (Also in 36)

Breaking Changes​

Utility Process unhandled rejection behavior change​

Utility Processes will now warn with an error message when an unhandled rejection occurs instead of crashing the process.

To restore the previous behavior, you can use:

process.on('unhandledRejection', () => {
  process.exit(1);
});

Behavior Changed: process.exit() kills utility process synchronously​

Calling process.exit() in a utility process will now kill the utility process synchronously. This brings the behavior of process.exit() in line with Node.js behavior.

Please refer to the Node.js docs and PR #45690 to understand the potential implications of that, e.g., when calling console.log() before process.exit().

Behavior Changed: WebUSB and WebSerial Blocklist Support​

WebUSB and Web Serial now support the WebUSB Blocklist and Web Serial Blocklist used by Chromium and outlined in their respective specifications.

To disable these, users can pass disable-usb-blocklist and disable-serial-blocklist as command line flags.

Removed: null value for session property in ProtocolResponse​

This deprecated feature has been removed.

Previously, setting the ProtocolResponse.session property to null would create a random independent session. This is no longer supported.

Using single-purpose sessions here is discouraged due to overhead costs; however, old code that needs to preserve this behavior can emulate it by creating a random session with session.fromPartition(some_random_string) and then using it in ProtocolResponse.session.

Behavior Changed: BrowserWindow.IsVisibleOnAllWorkspaces() on Linux​

BrowserWindow.IsVisibleOnAllWorkspaces() will now return false on Linux if the window is not currently visible.

End of Support for 34.x.y​

Electron 34.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 36.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

Writing Tools Support​

In Electron 36, you can enable macOS system-level features like Writing Tools (spelling and grammar), Autofill, and Services menu items in your context menus. To do so, pass a WebFrameMain instance into the frame parameter for menu.popup().

import { BrowserWindow, Menu, WebFrameMain } from 'electron';

const currentWindow = BrowserWindow.getFocusedWindow();
const focusedFrame = currentWindow.webContents.focusedFrame;
const menu = Menu.buildFromTemplate([{ label: 'Copy', role: 'copy' }]);

menu.popup({
  window: currentWindow,
  frame: focusedFrame,
});

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 136.0.7103.48
  • New in 136
  • New in 135
• Node 22.14.0
  • Node 22.14.0 blog post
• V8 13.6

Electron 36 upgrades Chromium from 134.0.6998.23 to 136.0.7103.48, and V8 from 13.5 to 13.6.

New Features and Improvements​

• Added BrowserWindow.isSnapped() to indicate whether a given window has been arranged via Snap on Windows. #46226
• Added WebContents.focusedFrame to get the focused frame.
• Fixed WebContents.opener to specify potential null type. #45667
• Added ffmpeg.dll to delay load configuration. #46173 (Also in 34, 35)
• Added nativeTheme.shouldUseDarkColorsForSystemIntegratedUI to distinguish system and app theme. #46598 (Also in 35)
• Added excludeUrls to webRequest filter and deprecated the use of empty arrays in urls property. #44692 (Also in 35)
• Added support for Autofill, Writing Tools and Services macOS level menu items in context menus via the new frame option in menu.popup. #46350
• Added support for system-context-menu on Linux. #46399
• Improved ASAR integrity checks on Windows. #46537
• Improved performance of desktopCapturer.getSources when not requesting thumbnails on macOS. #46251 (Also in 34, 35)
• Removed 240 FPS limit when using shared texture OSR. #45669 (Also in 35)

Breaking Changes​

Deprecated: NativeImage.getBitmap()​

The NativeImage.getBitmap() function is now deprecated and documented as an alias for NativeImage.toBitmap(). The two functions both return a newly-allocated copy of the bitmap and are functionally equivalent.

Deprecated: Extension methods and events on session​

session.loadExtension, session.removeExtension, session.getExtension, session.getAllExtensions, and the events extension-loaded, extension-unloaded, and extension-ready have all moved to the new Extensions object accessible via the session.extensions instance property.

Removed: quota type syncable in session.clearStorageData(options)​

When calling session.clearStorageData(options), the options.quota type syncable is no longer supported because it has been removed from upstream Chromium.

Deprecated: quota property in session.clearStorageData(options)​

When calling Session.clearStorageData(options), the options.quota property is deprecated. Since the syncable type was removed, there is only type left -- 'temporary' -- so specifying it is unnecessary.

Behavior Changed: GTK 4 is the default when running on GNOME​

After an upstream change, GTK 4 is now the default when running on GNOME.

In rare cases, this may cause some applications or configurations to error with the following message:

Gtk-ERROR **: 11:30:38.382: GTK 2/3 symbols detected. Using GTK 2/3 and GTK 4 in the same process is not supported

Affected users can work around this by specifying the gtk-version command-line flag:

$ electron --gtk-version=3   # or --gtk-version=2

The same can be done with the app.commandLine.appendSwitch function.

Behavior Changed: app.commandLine​

app.commandLine will convert uppercases switches and arguments to lowercase.

app.commandLine was only meant to handle Chromium switches (which aren't case-sensitive) and switches passed via app.commandLine will not be passed down to any of the child processes.

If you were using app.commandLine to parse app-specific command line arguments, you should do this via process.argv.

End of Support for 33.x.y​

Electron 33.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 35.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

Service Worker Preload Scripts for Improved Extensions Support​

Originally proposed in RFC #8 by @samuelmaddock, Electron 35 adds the ability to attach a preload script to Service Workers. With Chrome's Manifest V3 Extensions routing a lot of work through extension service workers, this feature fills in a gap in Electron's support for modern Chrome extensions.

When registering a preload script programmatically at the Session level, you can now specifically apply it to Service Worker contexts with the ses.registerPreloadScript(script) API.

// Add our preload realm script to the session.
session.defaultSession.registerPreloadScript({
  // Our script should only run in service worker preload realms.
  type: 'service-worker',
  // The absolute path to the script.
  script: path.join(__dirname, 'extension-sw-preload.js'),
});

Furthermore, IPC is now available between Service Workers and their attached preload scripts via the ServiceWorkerMain.ipc class. The preload script will still use the ipcRenderer module to communicate with its Service Worker. See the original RFC for more details.

This feature was preceded by many other changes that laid the groundwork for it:

• #45329 redesigned the Session module's preload APIs to support registering and unregistering individual preload scripts.
• #45229 added the experimental contextBridge.executeInMainWorld(executionScript) script to evaluate JavaScript in the main world over the context bridge.
• #45341 added the ServiceWorkerMain class to interact with Service Workers in the main process.

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 134.0.6998.44
  • New in 134
  • New in 133
• Node 22.14.0
  • Node 22.14.0 blog post
• V8 13.5

Electron 35 upgrades Chromium from 132.0.6834.83 to 134.0.6998.44, Node from 20.18.1 to 22.14.0, and V8 from 13.2 to 13.5.

New Features​

• Added NSPrefersDisplaySafeAreaCompatibilityMode = false to Info.plist to remove "Scale to fit below built-in camera." from app options. #45357 ^{(Also in v34.1.0)}
• Added ServiceWorkerMain class to interact with service workers in the main process. #45341
  • Added running-status-changed event on ServiceWorkers to indicate when a service worker's running status has changed.
  • Added startWorkerForScope on ServiceWorkers to start a worker that may have been previously stopped.
• Added experimental contextBridge.executeInMainWorld to safely execute code across world boundaries. #45330
• Added frame to 'console-message' event. #43617
• Added query-session-end event and improved session-end events on Windows. #44598
• Added view.getVisible(). #45409
• Added webContents.navigationHistory.restore(index, entries) API that allows restoration of navigation history. #45583
• Added optional animation parameter to BrowserWindow.setVibrancy. #35987
• Added permission support for document.executeCommand("paste"). #45471 ^{(Also in v34.1.0)}
• Added support for roundedCorners BrowserWindow constructor option on Windows. #45740 ^{(Also in v34.3.0)}
• Added support for service worker preload scripts. #45408
• Support Portal's globalShortcuts. Electron must be run with --enable-features=GlobalShortcutsPortal in order to have the feature working. #45297

Breaking Changes​

Removed: isDefault and status properties on PrinterInfo​

These properties have been removed from the PrinterInfo object because they have been removed from upstream Chromium.

Deprecated: getFromVersionID on session.serviceWorkers​

The session.serviceWorkers.fromVersionID(versionId) API has been deprecated in favor of session.serviceWorkers.getInfoFromVersionID(versionId). This was changed to make it more clear which object is returned with the introduction of the session.serviceWorkers.getWorkerFromVersionID(versionId) API.

// Deprecated
session.serviceWorkers.fromVersionID(versionId);

// Replace with
session.serviceWorkers.getInfoFromVersionID(versionId);

Deprecated: setPreloads, getPreloads on Session​

registerPreloadScript, unregisterPreloadScript, and getPreloadScripts are introduced as a replacement for the deprecated methods. These new APIs allow third-party libraries to register preload scripts without replacing existing scripts. Also, the new type option allows for additional preload targets beyond frame.

// Deprecated
session.setPreloads([path.join(__dirname, 'preload.js')]);

// Replace with:
session.registerPreloadScript({
  type: 'frame',
  id: 'app-preload',
  filePath: path.join(__dirname, 'preload.js'),
});

Deprecated: level, message, line, and sourceId arguments in console-message event on WebContents​

The console-message event on WebContents has been updated to provide details on the Event argument.

// Deprecated
webContents.on(
  'console-message',
  (event, level, message, line, sourceId) => {},
);

// Replace with:
webContents.on(
  'console-message',
  ({ level, message, lineNumber, sourceId, frame }) => {},
);

Additionally, level is now a string with possible values of info, warning, error, and debug.

Behavior Changed: urls property of WebRequestFilter.​

Previously, an empty urls array was interpreted as including all URLs. To explicitly include all URLs, developers should now use the <all_urls> pattern, which is a designated URL pattern that matches every possible URL. This change clarifies the intent and ensures more predictable behavior.

// Deprecated
const deprecatedFilter = {
  urls: [],
};

// Replace with
const newFilter = {
  urls: ['<all_urls>'],
};

Deprecated: systemPreferences.isAeroGlassEnabled()​

The systemPreferences.isAeroGlassEnabled() function has been deprecated without replacement. It has been always returning true since Electron 23, which only supports Windows 10+, where DWM composition can no longer be disabled.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dwm/composition-ovw#disabling-dwm-composition-windows7-and-earlier

End of Support for 32.x.y​

Electron 32.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

For more details about the program, visit Google’s Summer of Code homepage.

About us​

Electron is a JavaScript framework for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies. The core Electron framework is a compiled binary executable built with Chromium and Node.js, and is mostly written in C++.

Outside of the Electron core repository, we also maintain several projects to support the Electron ecosystem, including:

• Tools for end-user distribution (e.g. Electron Forge and update.electronjs.org).
• Learning materials for Electron developers (e.g. electronjs.org and Electron Fiddle).
• Internal tools to enhance developer productivity (e.g. Electron Build Tools and Sheriff).

As a GSoC contributor, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with some of Electron’s core contributors on one of many projects under the github.com/electron umbrella.

Before applying​

If you aren’t very familiar with Electron, we would recommend you start by reading the documentation and trying out some of the examples in Electron Fiddle.

To learn more about distributing Electron apps, try creating a sample application with Electron Forge:

npm init electron-app@latest my-app

After familiarizing yourself with the code a bit, come join the conversation on the Electron Discord server.

Project contributions​

We encourage you to take a look at any repositories that are relevant to the project ideas you are interested in. One way of doing your research is to make contributions by reporting bugs, triaging existing issues, or submitting pull requests. Doing so is an effective way of getting hands-on practice with our codebases, but is not mandatory for proposal submissions. A well-crafted proposal should be able to demonstrate your understanding of the code without needing to refer to past contributions.

Here are a few tips if you are looking to contribute to Electron before submitting your proposal:

1. Please provide descriptive issue or PR descriptions when submitting contributions. Regardless of the code itself, putting effort into the written part of a contribution shows us that you can be an effective communicator in a collaborative environment.
2. PRs are always welcome for open issues. You do not need to comment on an issue asking a maintainer if you can be assigned to it. Note that we still encourage you to discuss potential solutions on an issue if you need to refine an idea for a solution, but comments strictly asking if you can work on something are redundant and add noise to the issue tracker.
3. Low-effort project contributions (e.g. invalid issue reports, trivial wording changes in a repo README, or minor stylistic changes to front-end code) will negatively impact your final proposal, as they take up limited maintainer time and do not provide any net benefit to the Electron project.
4. While AI coding assistants can be an effective tool for debugging and understanding new concepts, we highly discourage contributions that are copy/pasted directly from AI-generated output. These often turn out to be of low quality, and it's often more effort for maintainers to clean up code generated from an LLM than for us to just reject a PR altogether.

Crafting your proposal​

Interested in collaborating with Electron? First, check out the seven project idea drafts we have prepared. All listed ideas are open for proposals.

If you have a unique idea not on the list, we are open to considering it, but ensure your proposal is detailed and thoroughly outlined. When in doubt, we recommend sticking with our listed ideas.

Your application should include:

• A detailed proposal outlining what you plan to achieve over the summer.
• Your background as a developer. If you have a resume, please include a copy. Otherwise, tell us about your past technical experience.
  • Lack of experience in certain areas won’t disqualify you, but it will help our mentors work out a plan to best support you and make sure your summer project is successful.

A detailed guide of what to submit as part of your Electron application is here. Submit proposals directly to the Google Summer of Code portal. Proposals emailed to the Electron team will not be considered as final submissions.

For more guidance on your proposal, we recommend you follow the official Google Summer of Code proposal writing advice here.

Applications open on March 24th, 2025 and close on April 8th, 2025.

Questions?​

If you have questions we didn’t address in this blog post or inquiries about your proposal draft, please send us an email at summer-of-code@electronjs.org or check the GSoC FAQ. Please read our contributor guidance before emailing.

Resources​

• Electron Google Summer of Code 2025 Ideas List
• Electron Google Summer of Code 2025 Contributor Guidance
• Google Summer of Code Student/Contributor Guide

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 34.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

HTTP Compression Shared Dictionary Management APIs​

HTTP compression allows data to be compressed by a web server before being received by the browser. Modern versions of Chromium support Brotli and Zstandard, which are newer compression algorithms that perform better for text files than older schemes such as gzip.

Custom shared dictionaries further improve the efficiency of Brotli and Zstandard compression. See the Chrome for Developers blog on shared dictionaries for more information.

@felixrieseberg added the following APIs in #44950 to manage shared dictionaries at the Session level:

• session.getSharedDictionaryUsageInfo()
• session.getSharedDictionaryInfo(options)
• session.clearSharedDictionaryCache()
• session.clearSharedDictionaryCacheForIsolationKey(options)

Unresponsive Renderer JavaScript Call Stacks​

Electron's unresponsive event occurs whenever a renderer process hangs for an excessive period of time. The new WebFrameMain.collectJavaScriptCallStack() API added by @samuelmaddock in #44204 allows you to collect the JavaScript call stack from the associated WebFrameMain object (webContnets.mainFrame).

This API can be useful to determine why the frame is unresponsive in cases where there's long-running JavaScript events causing the process to hang. For more information, see the proposed web standard Crash Reporting API.

const { app } = require('electron');

app.commandLine.appendSwitch(
  'enable-features',
  'DocumentPolicyIncludeJSCallStacksInCrashReports',
);

app.on('web-contents-created', (_, webContents) => {
  webContents.on('unresponsive', async () => {
    // Interrupt execution and collect call stack from unresponsive renderer
    const callStack = await webContents.mainFrame.collectJavaScriptCallStack();
    console.log('Renderer unresponsive\n', callStack);
  });
});

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 132.0.6834.83
  • New in 131
  • New in 132
• Node 20.18.1
  • Node 20.18.1 blog post
• V8 13.2

Electron 34 upgrades Chromium from 130.0.6723.44 to 132.0.6834.83, Node from 20.18.0 to 20.18.1, and V8 from 13.0 to 13.2.

New Features​

• Added APIs to manage shared dictionaries for compression efficiency using Brotli or ZStandard. The new APIs are session.getSharedDictionaryUsageInfo(), session.getSharedDictionaryInfo(options), session.clearSharedDictionaryCache(), and session.clearSharedDictionaryCacheForIsolationKey(options). #44950
• Added WebFrameMain.collectJavaScriptCallStack() for accessing the JavaScript call stack of unresponsive renderers. #44938
• Added WebFrameMain.detached for frames in an unloading state.
  • Added WebFrameMain.isDestroyed() to determine if a frame has been destroyed.
  • Fixed webFrameMain.fromId(processId, frameId) returning a WebFrameMain instance which doesn't match the given parameters when the frame is unloading. #43473
• Added error event in utility process to support diagnostic reports on V8 fatal errors. #43774
• Feat: GPU accelerated shared texture offscreen rendering. #42953

Breaking Changes​

Behavior Changed: menu bar will be hidden during fullscreen on Windows​

This brings the behavior to parity with Linux. Prior behavior: Menu bar is still visible during fullscreen on Windows. New behavior: Menu bar is hidden during fullscreen on Windows.

Correction: This was previously listed as a breaking change in Electron 33, but was first released in Electron 34.

End of Support for 31.x.y​

Electron 31.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

What does this mean?​

In the past, packages in Electron’s npm ecosystem (Forge, Packager, etc) have supported Node versions for as long as possible, even after a version has reached its End-Of-Life (EOL) date. This is done to make sure we don’t fragment the ecosystem—we understand that many projects depend on older versions of Node, and we don’t want to risk stranding those projects unless there was a pressing reason to upgrade.

Over time, using Node.js 14 as our minimum version has become increasingly difficult for a few reasons:

• Lack of official Node.js 14 macOS ARM64 builds requires us to maintain CI infrastructure workarounds to provide full test coverage.
• engines requirements for upstream package dependencies have moved forward, making it increasingly difficult to resolve supply chain security issues with dependency bumps.

Additionally, newer versions of Node.js have included many improvements that we would like to leverage, such as runtime-native common utilities (e.g. fs.glob and util.parseArgs) and entire new batteries-included modules (e.g. node:test, node:sqlite).

Why upgrade now?​

In July 2024, Electron’s Ecosystem Working Group decided to upgrade all packages to the earliest Node version where require()of synchronous ESM graphs will be supported (see nodejs/node#51977 and nodejs/node#53500) at a future point after that version reaches its LTS date.

We’ve decided to set that update time to January/February 2025. After this upgrade occurs, Node 22 will be the minimum supported version in existing ecosystem packages.

What action do I need to take?​

We’ll strive to maintain compatibility as much as possible. However, to ensure the best support, we encourage you to upgrade your apps to Node 22 or higher.

Note that the Node version running in your project is unrelated to the Node version embedded into your current version of Electron.

What's next​

Please feel free to write to us at info@electronjs.org if you have any questions or concerns. You can also find community support in our official Electron Discord.

via GIPHY

What will be the same in December​

1. Zero-day and other major security-related releases will be published as necessary. Security incidents should be reported via SECURITY.md.
2. Code of Conduct reports and moderation will continue.

What will be different in December​

1. 2024's last stable branch releases for the year, which include Electron 31, 32, and 33, will occur the week of December 1st. There will be no additional planned releases in December.
2. No Nightly and Alpha releases for the last two weeks of December.
3. With few exceptions, no pull request reviews or merges.
4. No issue tracker updates on any repositories.
5. No Discord debugging help from maintainers.
6. No social media content updates.

See you all in 2025!

Electron is moving from BrowserView to WebContentsView to align with Chromium’s UI framework, the Views API. WebContentsView offers a reusable view directly tied to Chromium’s rendering pipeline, simplifying future upgrades and opening up the possibility for developers to integrate non-web UI elements to their Electron apps. By adopting WebContentsView, applications are not only prepared for upcoming updates but also benefit from reduced code complexity and fewer potential bugs in the long run.

Developers familiar with BrowserWindows and BrowserViews should note that BrowserWindow and WebContentsView are subclasses inheriting from the BaseWindow and View base classes, respectively. To fully understand the available instance variables and methods, be sure to consult the documentation for these base classes.

Migration steps​

1. Upgrade Electron to 30.0.0 or higher​

2. Familiarize yourself with where your application uses BrowserViews​

One way to do this is to search your codebase for new BrowserView(. This should give you a sense for how your application is using BrowserViews and how many call sites need to be migrated.

3. Migrate each usage of BrowserView​

1. Migrate the instantiation. This should be fairly straightforward because WebContentsView and BrowserView’s constructors have essentially the same shape. Both accept WebPreferences via the webPreferences param.

   - this.tabBar = new BrowserView({
   + this.tabBar = new WebContentsView({
   

   info

   By default, WebContentsView instantiates with a white background, while BrowserView instantiates with a transparent background. To get a transparent background in WebContentsView, set its background color to an RGBA hex value with an alpha (opaqueness) channel set to 00:

   + this.webContentsView.setBackgroundColor("#00000000");
   

2. Migrate where the BrowserView gets added to its parent window.

   - this.browserWindow.addBrowserView(this.tabBar)
   + this.browserWindow.contentView.addChildView(this.tabBar);
   

3. Migrate BrowserView instance method calls on the parent window.

   Old Method	New Method	Notes
   win.setBrowserView	win.contentView.removeChildView + win.contentView.addChildView
   win.getBrowserView	win.contentView.children
   win.removeBrowserView	win.contentView.removeChildView
   win.setTopBrowserView	win.contentView.addChildView	Calling addChildView on an existing view reorders it to the top.
   win.getBrowserViews	win.contentView.children

4. Migrate the setAutoResize instance method to a resize listener.

   - this.browserView.setAutoResize({
   -   vertical: true,
   - })
   
   + this.browserWindow.on('resize', () => {
   +   if (!this.browserWindow || !this.webContentsView) {
   +     return;
   +   }
   +   const bounds = this.browserWindow.getBounds();
   +   this.webContentsView.setBounds({
   +     x: 0,
   +     y: 0,
   +     width: bounds.width,
   +     height: bounds.height,
   +    });
   +  });
   

   tip

   All existing usage of browserView.webContents and instance methods browserView.setBounds, browserView.getBounds , and browserView.setBackgroundColor do not need to be migrated and should work with a WebContentsView instance out of the box!

4. Test and commit your changes​

Running into issues? Check the WebContentsView tag on Electron's issue tracker to see if the issue you're encountering has been reported. If you don't see your issue there, feel free to add a new bug report. Including testcase gists will help us better triage your issue!

Congrats, you’ve migrated onto WebContentsViews! 🎉

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 33.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Twitter or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

• Added a handler, app.setClientCertRequestPasswordHandler(handler), to help unlock cryptographic devices when a PIN is needed. #41205
• Extended navigationHistory API with 2 new functions for better history management. #42014
• Improved native theme transparency checking. #42862

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 130.0.6723.44
  • New in 130
  • New in 129
• Node 20.18.0
  • Node 20.18.0 blog post
  • Node 20.17.0 blog post
• V8 13.0

Electron 33 upgrades Chromium from 128.0.6613.36 to 130.0.6723.44, Node from 20.16.0 to 20.18.0, and V8 from 12.8 to 13.0.

New Features​

• Added a handler, app.setClientCertRequestPasswordHandler(handler), to help unlock cryptographic devices when a PIN is needed. #41205
• Added error event in utility process to support diagnostic reports on V8 fatal errors. #43997
• Added View.setBorderRadius(radius) for customizing the border radius of views—with compatibility for WebContentsView. #42320
• Extended navigationHistory API with 2 new functions for better history management. #42014

Breaking Changes​

Removed: macOS 10.15 support​

macOS 10.15 (Catalina) is no longer supported by Chromium.

Older versions of Electron will continue to run on Catalina, but macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later will be required to run Electron v33.0.0 and higher.

Behavior Changed: Native modules now require C++20​

Due to changes made upstream, both V8 and Node.js now require C++20 as a minimum version. Developers using native node modules should build their modules with --std=c++20 rather than --std=c++17. Images using gcc9 or lower may need to update to gcc10 in order to compile. See #43555 for more details.

Behavior Changed: custom protocol URL handling on Windows​

Due to changes made in Chromium to support Non-Special Scheme URLs, custom protocol URLs that use Windows file paths will no longer work correctly with the deprecated protocol.registerFileProtocol and the baseURLForDataURL property on BrowserWindow.loadURL, WebContents.loadURL, and <webview>.loadURL. protocol.handle will also not work with these types of URLs but this is not a change since it has always worked that way.

// No longer works
protocol.registerFileProtocol('other', () => {
  callback({ filePath: '/path/to/my/file' });
});

const mainWindow = new BrowserWindow();
mainWindow.loadURL(
  'data:text/html,<script src="loaded-from-dataurl.js"></script>',
  { baseURLForDataURL: 'other://C:\\myapp' },
);
mainWindow.loadURL('other://C:\\myapp\\index.html');

// Replace with
const path = require('node:path');
const nodeUrl = require('node:url');
protocol.handle(other, (req) => {
  const srcPath = 'C:\\myapp\\';
  const reqURL = new URL(req.url);
  return net.fetch(
    nodeUrl.pathToFileURL(path.join(srcPath, reqURL.pathname)).toString(),
  );
});

mainWindow.loadURL(
  'data:text/html,<script src="loaded-from-dataurl.js"></script>',
  { baseURLForDataURL: 'other://' },
);
mainWindow.loadURL('other://index.html');

Behavior Changed: webContents property on login on app​

The webContents property in the login event from app will be null when the event is triggered for requests from the utility process created with respondToAuthRequestsFromMainProcess option.

Deprecated: textured option in BrowserWindowConstructorOption.type​

The textured option of type in BrowserWindowConstructorOptions has been deprecated with no replacement. This option relied on the NSWindowStyleMaskTexturedBackground style mask on macOS, which has been deprecated with no alternative.

Deprecated: systemPreferences.accessibilityDisplayShouldReduceTransparency​

The systemPreferences.accessibilityDisplayShouldReduceTransparency property is now deprecated in favor of the new nativeTheme.prefersReducedTransparency, which provides identical information and works cross-platform.

// Deprecated
const shouldReduceTransparency =
  systemPreferences.accessibilityDisplayShouldReduceTransparency;

// Replace with:
const prefersReducedTransparency = nativeTheme.prefersReducedTransparency;

End of Support for 30.x.y​

Electron 30.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

Hi 👋, I'm Peter, the 2024 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) contributor to Electron.

Over the course of the GSoC program, I implemented an API history feature for the Electron documentation and its functions, classes, etc. in a similar fashion to the Node.js documentation: by allowing the use of a simple but powerful YAML schema in the API documentation Markdown files and displaying it nicely on the Electron documentation website.

Details​

API history documentation system / YAML schema​

In the Markdown API documentation, the history for a function/class/etc. is now placed directly after the header for that item in the form of a YAML code block encapsulated by an HTML comment.

#### `win.setTrafficLightPosition(position)` _macOS_

<!--
```YAML history
added:
  - pr-url: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/22533
changes:
  - pr-url: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/26789
    description: "Made `trafficLightPosition` option work for `customButtonOnHover` window."
deprecated:
  - pr-url: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/37094
    breaking-changes-header: deprecated-browserwindowsettrafficlightpositionposition
```
-->

* `position` [Point](structures/point.md)

Set a custom position for the traffic light buttons. Can only be used with `titleBarStyle` set to `hidden`.

I believe using YAML like the Node.js docs do was the best approach because it is easy to read. The API history isn't extremely complicated and should ideally be as easy to write and read as possible.

The final design shown above is actually significantly different to the one I proposed:

<!--
```YAML history
added: v10.0.0
deprecated: v25.0.0
removed: v28.0.0
changes:
  - version: v13.0.0
    pr-url: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/26789
    description: Made `trafficLightPosition` option work for `customButtonOnHover` window.
```
-->

One large change is the removal of version numbers:

"[...] There’s one somewhat significant change we’d like to call out about the proposal, which came up during discussion when we were reviewing proposals. [...]

[we] decided that the approach with the [fewest] drawbacks would be to only use PR URLs (the root PRs to main) instead of hardcoded version strings as in the proposal.

This can serve as a single source of truth which can then be used to derive exact version numbers, and no further documentation changes on main are necessary if the change is backported to other branches."

— David Sanders (@dsanders11) via Slack

We also didn't include removals in the API History, since when an API is removed from Electron, it is also removed from the documentation.

JavaScript implementation​

I originally planned to create a new @electron/docs-api-history-tools npm package that would contain scripts for extracting, validating/linting and converting the API history in the documentation files.

About a week before the coding period began, and after some discussion with my mentors, I realized that was probably unnecessary:

"Hi everyone, I was thinking about the project after our huddle: Considering that extraction logic will have to be handled differently in e/website and e/lint-roller because of their dependencies, maybe there is no need for a separate package for API history stuff?"

Proposed	Revised

— Piotr Płaczek (me) via Slack

We ultimately decided to not go ahead with my original idea:

"@Piotr Płaczek that seems fine to me! I think we can always refactor out to a separate module in a later iteration if we find that we need to share a lot of code between the two implementations anyways 🙂"

— Erick Zhao (@erickzhao) via Slack

Instead, we divided those various tools across the Electron repos that were most relevant to them:

• yaml-api-history-schema.json
  • -> electron/electron (api-history.schema.json)
• lint-yaml-api-history.ts
  • -> electron/lint-roller (lint-markdown-api-history.ts)
• extract-yaml-api-history.ts
  • -> electron/website (preprocess-api-history.ts)
• yaml-api-history-to-markdown.ts
  • -> electron/website (transformers/api-history.ts)
  • -> electron/website (ApiHistoryTable.tsx)

UI and styling for Electron documentation website​

I originally proposed a simple table to display the API History data:

Design Prototype (Closed)	Design Prototype (Open)

This is what the final implemented design looks like:

Pretty much the same as the prototype. The most significant addition is the use of SemVer ranges, which were chosen to better communicate which versions a feature is present in (thanks Samuel Attard (@MarshallOfSound) for the suggestion!).

This is important because changes are frequently backported across supported Electron release lines e.g. a fix may make it into Electron v32.0.0, v31.1.0 and v30.2.0. This means it is not present in v31.0.0 which a user might mistakenly deduce based on the fact it is present in a v30.x.x release.

Usage/style guide​

I added a usage/style guide dedicated to writing API history documentation for new features. I described proper usages of the YAML schema in detail, provided typical/useful examples, etc. You can find it here.

Migration guide​

Since existing APIs have to be migrated to the new documentation system, I created a migration guide. It features the typical steps of what a developer has to do when migrating old APIs: looking through breaking changes, browsing through the past releases, maybe looking through old commits, etc. Then instructing the developer to follow the usage/style guide to add API history documentation for each previously existing class/function/etc.

Sadly, I couldn't think of a way to automate this effectively. This would probably be a great task for an AI/ML engineer; however, I don't possess those skills and was too afraid of accidentally introducing hallucinations into the API history. Even if automated, the information would still probably have to be verified by a human in the end 😕. This task will probably have to be done manually, on a file-by-file basis, just like it was done for the Node.js documentation.

Deliverables​

• api-history.schema.json

  • A comprehensive YAML schema for documenting API history which includes support for:
    • Additions
    • Deprecations
    • Changes
    • Links to relevant pull requests
    • Backports
  • Proposed in: electron/rfc#6
  • Implemented/Used in: electron/electron#42982
  • Used in: electron/website#594

• lint-markdown-api-history.ts

  • Script for linting YAML API history written according to a custom YAML (technically JSON) schema.
    • Useful error messages
    • Comprehensive documentation / code comments
    • Extensive Jest Vitest tests
    • Good performance
  • Implemented in: electron/lint-roller#73
  • Used in: electron/electron#42982

• preprocess-api-history.ts

  • Performs simple validation just in case incorrect API History manages to make it into the repo. Also strips the HTML comment tags that wrap API History blocks since Docusaurus cannot parse them.
  • Implemented/Used in: electron/website#594

• transformers/api-history.ts

  • Script for converting YAML API history blocks in the Markdown documentation files to Markdown/HTML React tables (ApiHistoryTable.tsx).
  • Implemented/Used in: electron/website#594

• ApiHistoryTable.tsx

  • React table component used to display parsed API History data on the documentation website.
    • Uses styling that follows the rest of the website's design.
    • Responsive, accessible, and generally well written HTML, CSS, and JS.
  • Implemented/Used in: electron/website#594

• styleguide.md

  • Usage/style guide section for new API history documentation system.
    • Easy to understand
    • Well written
    • Includes examples
  • Implemented/Used in: electron/electron#42982

• api-history-migration-guide.md

  • Migration guide for new API history documentation system.
    • Easy to understand
    • Well written
    • Includes examples
  • Implemented/Used in: electron/electron#42982

Conclusion​

I had a lot of fun working on this feature and was able to earn valuable experience from code reviews and discussing its various implementation details with the team.

I believe the addition of API history to the documentation will make the lives of developers using Electron a lot easier, especially ones attempting to migrate their existing app from a several year old Electron version.

I also want to sincerely thank my mentors:

• David Sanders (@dsanders11)
• Keeley Hammond (@VerteDinde)
• Erick Zhao (@erickzhao)

...and the rest of the Electron team for answering my questions and taking the time to give me feedback on my pull requests. It is very much appreciated.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 32.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Twitter or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

• Added new API version history in our documentation, a feature created by @piotrpdev as part of Google Summer of Code. You can learn more about it in this blog post. #42982
• Removed nonstandard File.path extension from the Web File API. #42053
• Aligned failure pathway in Web File System API with upstream when attempting to open a file or directory in a blocked path. #42993
• Added the following existing navigation-related APIs to webcontents.navigationHistory: canGoBack, goBack, canGoForward, goForward, canGoToOffset, goToOffset, clear. The previous navigation APIs are now deprecated. #41752

Stack Changes​

• Chromium128.0.6613.36
  • New in 128
  • New in 127
• Node 20.16.0
  • Node 20.16.0 blog post
• V8 12.8

Electron 32 upgrades Chromium from 126.0.6478.36 to 128.0.6613.36, Node from 20.14.0 to 20.16.0, and V8 from 12.6 to 12.8.

New Features​

• Added support for responding to auth requests initiated from the utility process via the app module's 'login' event. #43317
• Added the cumulativeCPUUsage property to the CPUUsage structure, which returns the total seconds of CPU time used since process startup. #41819
• Added the following existing navigation related APIs to webContents.navigationHistory: canGoBack, goBack, canGoForward, goForward, canGoToOffset, goToOffset, clear. #41752
• Extended WebContentsView to accept pre-existing webContents objects. #42086
• Added a new property prefersReducedTransparency to nativeTheme, which indicates whether the user has chosen to reduce OS-level transparency via system accessibility settings. #43137
• Aligned failure pathway in File System Access API with upstream when attempting to open a file or directory in a blocked path. #42993
• Enabled the Windows Control Overlay API on Linux. #42681
• Enabled zstd compression in network requests. #43300

Breaking Changes​

Removed: File.path​

The nonstandard path property of the Web File object was added in an early version of Electron as a convenience method for working with native files when doing everything in the renderer was more common. However, it represents a deviation from the standard and poses a minor security risk as well, so beginning in Electron 32.0 it has been removed in favor of the webUtils.getPathForFile method.

// Before (renderer)
const file = document.querySelector('input[type=file]');
alert(`Uploaded file path was: ${file.path}`);

// After (renderer)
const file = document.querySelector('input[type=file]');
electron.showFilePath(file);

// After (preload)
const { contextBridge, webUtils } = require('electron');

contextBridge.exposeInMainWorld('electron', {
  showFilePath(file) {
    // It's best not to expose the full file path to the web content if
    // possible.
    const path = webUtils.getPathForFile(file);
    alert(`Uploaded file path was: ${path}`);
  },
});

Deprecated: clearHistory, canGoBack, goBack, canGoForward, goForward, goToIndex, canGoToOffset, goToOffset on WebContents​

Navigation-related APIs on WebContents instances are now deprecated. These APIs have been moved to the navigationHistory property of WebContents to provide a more structured and intuitive interface for managing navigation history.

// Deprecated
win.webContents.clearHistory();
win.webContents.canGoBack();
win.webContents.goBack();
win.webContents.canGoForward();
win.webContents.goForward();
win.webContents.goToIndex(index);
win.webContents.canGoToOffset();
win.webContents.goToOffset(index);

// Replace with
win.webContents.navigationHistory.clear();
win.webContents.navigationHistory.canGoBack();
win.webContents.navigationHistory.goBack();
win.webContents.navigationHistory.canGoForward();
win.webContents.navigationHistory.goForward();
win.webContents.navigationHistory.canGoToOffset();
win.webContents.navigationHistory.goToOffset(index);

Behavior changed: Directory databases in userData will be deleted​

If you have a directory called databases in the directory returned by app.getPath('userData'), it will be deleted when Electron 32 is first run. The databases directory was used by WebSQL, which was removed in Electron 31. Chromium now performs a cleanup that deletes this directory. See issue #45396.

End of Support for 29.x.y​

Electron 29.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 31.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Twitter or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

• Extended WebContentsView to accept pre-existing webContents object. #42319
• Added support for NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS. #41689
• Updated window.flashFrame(bool) to flash continuously on macOS. #41391
• Removed WebSQL support #41868
• nativeImage.toDataURL will preserve PNG colorspace #41610
• Extended webContents.setWindowOpenHandler to support manual creation of BrowserWindow. #41432

Stack Changes​

• Chromium126.0.6478.36
  • New in 126
  • New in 125
• Node 20.14.0
  • Node 20.14.0 blog post
• V8 12.6

Electron 31 upgrades Chromium from 124.0.6367.49 to 126.0.6478.36, Node from 20.11.1 to 20.14.0, and V8 from 12.4 to 12.6.

New Features​

• Added clearData method to Session. #40983
  • Added options parameter to Session.clearData API. #41355
• Added support for Bluetooth ports being requested by service class ID in navigator.serial. #41638
• Added support for Node's NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS environment variable. #41689
• Extended webContents.setWindowOpenHandler to support manual creation of BrowserWindow. #41432
• Implemented support for the web standard File System API. #41419
• Extended WebContentsView to accept pre-existing WebContents instances. #42319
• Added a new instance property navigationHistory on webContents API with navigationHistory.getEntryAtIndex method, enabling applications to retrieve the URL and title of any navigation entry within the browsing history. #41577 ^{(Also in 29, 30)}

Breaking Changes​

Removed: WebSQL support​

Chromium has removed support for WebSQL upstream, transitioning it to Android only. See Chromium's intent to remove discussion for more information.

Behavior Changed: nativeImage.toDataURL will preseve PNG colorspace​

PNG decoder implementation has been changed to preserve colorspace data. The encoded data returned from this function now matches it.

See crbug.com/332584706 for more information.

Behavior Changed: win.flashFrame(bool) will flash dock icon continuously on macOS​

This brings the behavior to parity with Windows and Linux. Prior behavior: The first flashFrame(true) bounces the dock icon only once (using the NSInformationalRequest level) and flashFrame(false) does nothing. New behavior: Flash continuously until flashFrame(false) is called. This uses the NSCriticalRequest level instead. To explicitly use NSInformationalRequest to cause a single dock icon bounce, it is still possible to use dock.bounce('informational').

End of Support for 28.x.y​

Electron 28.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 30.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Twitter or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

• ASAR Integrity fuse now supported on Windows (#40504)
  • Existing apps with ASAR Integrity enabled may not work on Windows if not configured correctly. Apps using Electron packaging tools should upgrade to @electron/packager@18.3.1 or @electron/forge@7.4.0.
  • Take a look at our ASAR Integrity tutorial for more information.
• Added WebContentsView and BaseWindow main process modules, deprecating & replacing BrowserView (#35658). Learn more about how to migrate from BrowserView to WebContentsView in this blog post.
  • BrowserView is now a shim over WebContentsView and the old implementation has been removed.
  • See our Web Embeds documentation for a comparison of the new WebContentsView API to other similar APIs.
• Implemented support for the File System API (#41827)

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 124.0.6367.49
  • New in Chrome 124 and in DevTools 124
  • New in Chrome 123 and in DevTools 123
• Node 20.11.1
  • Node 20.11.1 notes
• V8 12.4

Electron 30 upgrades Chromium from 122.0.6261.39 to 124.0.6367.49, Node from 20.9.0 to 20.11.1, and V8 from 12.2 to 12.4.

New Features​

• Added a transparent webpreference to webviews. (#40301)
• Added a new instance property navigationHistory on webContents API with navigationHistory.getEntryAtIndex method, enabling applications to retrieve the URL and title of any navigation entry within the browsing history. (#41662)
• Added new BrowserWindow.isOccluded() method to allow apps to check occlusion status. (#38982)
• Added proxy configuring support for requests made with the net module from the utility process. (#41417)
• Added support for Bluetooth ports being requested by service class ID in navigator.serial. (#41734)
• Added support for the Node.js NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS CLI flag. (#41822)

Breaking Changes​

Behavior Changed: cross-origin iframes now use Permission Policy to access features​

Cross-origin iframes must now specify features available to a given iframe via the allow attribute in order to access them.

See documentation for more information.

Removed: The --disable-color-correct-rendering command line switch​

This switch was never formally documented but its removal is being noted here regardless. Chromium itself now has better support for color spaces so this flag should not be needed.

Behavior Changed: BrowserView.setAutoResize behavior on macOS​

In Electron 30, BrowserView is now a wrapper around the new WebContentsView API.

Previously, the setAutoResize function of the BrowserView API was backed by autoresizing on macOS, and by a custom algorithm on Windows and Linux. For simple use cases such as making a BrowserView fill the entire window, the behavior of these two approaches was identical. However, in more advanced cases, BrowserViews would be autoresized differently on macOS than they would be on other platforms, as the custom resizing algorithm for Windows and Linux did not perfectly match the behavior of macOS's autoresizing API. The autoresizing behavior is now standardized across all platforms.

If your app uses BrowserView.setAutoResize to do anything more complex than making a BrowserView fill the entire window, it's likely you already had custom logic in place to handle this difference in behavior on macOS. If so, that logic will no longer be needed in Electron 30 as autoresizing behavior is consistent.

Removed: params.inputFormType property on context-menu on WebContents​

The inputFormType property of the params object in the context-menu event from WebContents has been removed. Use the new formControlType property instead.

Removed: process.getIOCounters()​

Chromium has removed access to this information.

End of Support for 27.x.y​

Electron 27.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.