Open your Task Manager right now and sort the list by memory usage. You will almost certainly see something familiar near the top. A chat app consuming hundreds of megabytes just sitting idle. A note-taking tool using as much RAM as Photoshop once required. A calendar application, which is just dates and text, drawing more processing power than entire operating systems once needed.
Most of the worst offenders share something in common. They are built on a framework called Electron. Understanding what Electron is explains a great deal about why modern desktop software so often feels heavier and slower than it should.
What Electron Actually Is
Electron is an open-source framework created by GitHub in 2013. It lets developers build desktop applications using the same technologies used to build websites: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
When you write an Electron app, you are building a webpage and then wrapping it inside a stripped-down version of the Chromium browser. Chromium is the same engine that powers Google Chrome. Every Electron app ships with its own private copy of Chromium and Node.js bundled inside it.
The result is a desktop application that, beneath the surface, is running a full web browser to display its interface. When you open Slack, you are launching a browser. When you open Discord, you are launching a browser. When you open VS Code, you are launching a browser. They look and behave like desktop apps. At the operating system level, though, they are web browsers in a costume.
This is why Electron apps routinely install at sizes between 100MB and 300MB even for simple applications. The bulk of that file size is not the app itself. It is the browser engine the app needs in order to run.
Why Developers Keep Choosing It
The answer is cross-platform development, and the logic is genuinely compelling even when the results frustrate users.
Building a native application properly means writing it separately for each platform. A Windows app uses Windows-specific technologies. A macOS app uses Apple-specific frameworks. A Linux app needs its own implementation. Maintaining three separate codebases, three teams of specialists, and three testing pipelines is an enormous overhead for any company.
Electron eliminates this problem. Write your app once using web technologies and it runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux without modification. The web skills required are also far more common than native platform expertise. There are many more JavaScript developers available to hire than specialists in Windows or macOS desktop development.
For companies like Slack and Discord, Electron meant a small team could ship a polished cross-platform product in a fraction of the time a native approach would take. The trade-off is performance and resource efficiency. Users bear that cost rather than the developers who made the decision.
VS Code is the most cited example of Electron done well. Microsoft's code editor is built entirely on Electron, yet it launches quickly, responds fast, and handles large projects without grinding to a halt. This proves the framework itself is not the problem. Building a well-optimised Electron app simply requires genuine engineering discipline, and many companies treat it as a shortcut rather than a foundation that still demands careful work.
What This Actually Means for Your PC
Multiple browsers running at once
Each Electron app running on your computer runs its own independent browser instance. Not a tab inside a shared browser. A completely separate browser.
When Slack, Discord, VS Code, and Figma are all open simultaneously, you have four separate browser engines running in parallel. Each has its own processes, its own memory, its own rendering pipeline, and its own JavaScript runtime.
This is why task managers show Electron apps spawning dozens of individual processes for what appears to be a single application. Chromium's security architecture deliberately isolates different parts of the browser from each other. This makes sense for a browser handling untrusted web content. Applied to a desktop chat app, it means a simple messaging client creates a process for its main window, separate processes for each feature panel, background service processes, and GPU-rendering processes, all running at the same time.
Memory that builds up over time
Discord acknowledged this problem publicly and at various points tested an automatic restart feature. It would silently relaunch the app if it had been open for more than an hour and memory had exceeded four gigabytes. The existence of that feature tells you everything about where the problem lies.
Memory leaks make things worse. When JavaScript applications do not cleanly release memory they no longer need, that memory accumulates over hours. An Electron app might use 300MB when you first open it and 1.2GB four hours later, even if you have not done anything particularly intensive. This is a software quality problem rather than a fundamental Electron flaw, but Electron's architecture makes leaks easier to introduce and harder to track down.
Battery drain on laptops
Background processes that never properly sleep, JavaScript timers running continuously, and constant GPU rendering for mostly static interfaces add up to measurably faster battery drain. This is most noticeable on thin laptops where efficiency matters. A handful of Electron apps running simultaneously can be the difference between lasting a full workday and reaching for the charger by early afternoon.
Apps You Use Every Day That Are Built on Electron
The list is longer than most people expect. Slack, Discord, Visual Studio Code, GitHub Desktop, Figma's desktop app, Notion, Obsidian, the Twitch desktop client, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Zoom are all Electron applications. Some password managers, download managers, and developer tools you may have installed are also Electron-based.
This is not a niche technology used by small startups cutting corners. It is the dominant way that cross-platform desktop software gets built today, used by some of the largest and most well-funded companies in the industry.
Why Some Companies Are Moving Away From It
Microsoft rebuilt Teams from scratch specifically to escape Electron's performance problems. The new Teams uses Microsoft's WebView2 component instead of bundling its own Chromium. WebView2 uses the version of Microsoft Edge already installed on your system rather than shipping a separate browser engine. The result is an application that uses dramatically less memory and launches considerably faster. Microsoft reported Teams becoming twice as efficient after the rewrite.
WhatsApp for Windows went the opposite direction. It replaced a lightweight native Windows application with a version built on Electron-adjacent web technology. Users who noticed the performance difference were not pleased.
Tauri is an alternative framework gaining traction as a lighter Electron replacement. Instead of bundling Chromium, Tauri uses the system's built-in web rendering engine. On Windows this is WebView2, on macOS it is WebKit. Tauri apps are smaller to install, use less memory, and start faster. The trade-off is a more complex development process and more limited access to certain web APIs, which is why Electron remains dominant despite these alternatives existing.
What You Can Actually Do About It
The practical options for everyday users are limited but worth knowing.
Checking your Task Manager regularly and noticing which apps are consuming disproportionate resources is the starting point. Restarting Electron apps that have been open for many hours brings memory usage back to baseline after leaks have accumulated.
For some Electron apps, using the browser version is a legitimate alternative. Slack, Notion, and Figma all work in the browser without requiring their desktop applications. Running them as browser tabs reduces the total overhead since they share your existing browser's engine rather than running their own.
Limiting how many Electron apps you keep open in the background is the most direct way to reduce their combined impact on memory and battery life. Closing applications you are not actively using rather than minimising them to the system tray makes a real difference on resource-constrained machines.
Will This Get Better
The honest answer is: slowly, and unevenly.
WebView2-based apps represent a genuine improvement for Windows users because they eliminate the redundant browser bundling. Tauri and similar frameworks may gain more adoption as developers become more aware of performance complaints. Some companies will invest in optimisation. Others will not.
The underlying economic logic that makes Electron attractive has not changed. One codebase for all platforms. Faster time to market. A larger pool of developers to hire from. Until native cross-platform development becomes substantially easier, or until users make adoption decisions based on resource efficiency in ways that affect developer incentives, Electron will remain a defining feature of modern desktop software.
What has changed is awareness. Users are increasingly vocal about the problem. That pressure, even if it does not immediately change choices, creates at least some incentive for developers to treat performance as something worth caring about.
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