The company has been adding new features and functionality to its desktop client constantly, and only recently released video calling and screen-sharing features to its entire user-base, after having rolled them out as a public beta to 5% of users a few weeks earlier.Ītom is a free, open source and highly customizable source code editor that’s build using the Electron framework. The software was initially released in March 2015, and has already gained a cult following among gamers with over 50 million registered users from around the world. That being the case, let’s take a look at the 5 best and most popular Electron apps that are available for download right now:ĭiscord is a free VoIP application that’s available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. There are literally hundreds of desktop applications that use Electron, and the list continues to grow with time. Modern cross-platform desktop applications built with JavaScript rely on either Electron or NW.js, and although both frameworks work in a similar manner for the most part, Electron is proving to be the more popular option among developers right now. While Electron proponents argue that bundling a web runtime is necessary to provide an identical experience to each and every single user irrespective of the platform of their choice, critics claim that it is a avoidably wasteful and highly inefficient way of doing things. That results in bloated build sizes and excess memory usage, because each of these apps run a separate instance of Chromium, hogging CPU and memory resources even when they’re just idling in the background. On the flipside, every Electron app bundles an entire web runtime with it, even though a suitable runtime already exists on all major operating systems. On the user-side, Electron applications have an uniform look and feel regardless of the operating system, and it will continue to remain that way years from now. For developers looking to lower costs and reduce dependencies, Electron is a huge asset as they don’t need to code across multiple browsers and operating systems. There are several benefits of using Electron instead of web resources to build an application, first and foremost among which is cross-platform compatibility. Benefits and Downsides of Using Electron to Build Desktop Applications Popular VoIP application Discord and open source text editors Atom and MS Visual Studio Code are some of the best examples of desktop applications that are powered by Electron. It was originally created by former Googler Cheng Zhao and is currently developed by GitHub as one of its own projects. Known as Atom Shell in its earlier avatar, Electron is a powerful open source framework that allows developers to create native cross-platform applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and CSS using Node.js runtime as the back-end component and Chromium for the front-end. While at it, we’ll also take a look at some of the best Electron apps that you can download right now. With more developers starting to build their apps on Electron for cross-platform compatibility, let’s take a look at what they are and why they’re gaining in popularity. It’s an amazing tool that makes it easy for developers to make their desktop programs compatible across a wide array of operating systems, including Windows, macOS and Linux, and although it does have it’s downsides, the benefits far outweigh the negatives for the most part. That being the case, developers wanting to code for all three major desktop operating systems have to re-write large portions of their code-base when porting their apps from one OS to another, making it a costly and laborious exercise. Making desktop programs compatible across platforms is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, because of the inherent differences in the way various operating systems work.
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