Why Electron?

[Yovach]

Hi,
I'm curious as to why the app is written with Electron and not with Tauri as it seems to be a website wrapper.

The Electron app requires a large file (a yet another chromium browser like VSCode and Discord) to be download whereas Tauri can be small

[flavienbonvin]

Hello, thanks for the feedback and the patience.

I can share some insights regarding why we went for Electron instead of Tauri. We started the project with a market overview of what our competitors and other companies were using, and the overwhelming majority is using either Electron or CEF. Here are a few reasons why we decided to go for Electron:

• Electron is mature, it has been present for more than 10 years now and has supported many companies to build spectacular software (VSCode, Slack, One Password, Discord).
• Electron Forge helps remove many of the pains of building custom Electron Builder configuration and significantly improved development speed.
• All the Node.js and JS ecosystem of libraries is available to support development. This can range to security vulnerability scanning (electronegativity) to an .app creation for an uninstaller (mac-appify).
• Electron is based on Node.js and Chromium. Chromium is one of the criticisms made against Electron, but it's also one of his strength. Using Chromium ensure a mostly consistent experience across all OSes.

Those are the main reasons we decided to go for Electron instead of alternatives such as Tauri. Tauri looks promising, but the lack of usage by big companies and the use of the OS web view (which could introduce unexpected bugs) was what made us go for Electron instead.

[Yovach]

Hi Flavien,
Thank you for your reply and for the details which make the choice much easier to understand.

The fear I had was particularly related to memory usage for Proton desktop applications (Proton Pass, Proton Pass and Proton Drive) which can be expensive on a relatively old PC.

[flavienbonvin]

I did some testing when selecting the technology for the desktop application. I reviewed some of our competitors and other well-known Electron applications. Please keep in mind that the test is very not scientific.

As you can see, 1Password is the one that consumes the less RAM (they have a rust library and a light client). What will consume RAM with Electron is caused by Chromium, but the application that is run inside is much more impactful. 1Password did an excellent work and have a very light client that communicates with a light Rust backend.

App	Tech	Start RAM	Logged RAM	Storage MB
1password	Electron	184	265	374.5
Proton Mail v0.1	Electron	203	375	221.1
Proton Mail v0.1	Tauri	273	364	41
Skiff	React Native?	266	658	37.1
Slack	Electron	327	546	766.9
Tutanota	Electron	239	329	277.2
VS Code	Electron	265	-	367.9