Beta Stories ■ Episode 4
“Write once, deploy everywhere! Cross-platform with web technologies!”
In 2014, GitHub released a framework that let web developers build desktop applications. JavaScript, HTML, CSS. One codebase, three platforms. Splendid.
One small detail: every application ships its very own copy of Chromium.
The Promise
Cross-platform development without learning three native toolkits. A genuinely attractive proposition. Slack adopted it. Discord adopted it. Microsoft built Teams on it. 1Password rewrote their native macOS app in it. VS Code became the most popular editor in history on it. By 2025, over 600 applications ship on Electron.
The promise was efficiency. For the company. Not, as it turns out, for the user.
The RAM Invoice
Your chat application uses more RAM than your entire operating system did in 2010. With memory prices trading like precious metals, quite the architectural choice.
Slack: 130 to 960 MB. For messages. A single workspace, sitting idle, consuming resources that would have run an entire office suite fifteen years ago.
Discord: memory leaks so severe they auto-restart the application when it exceeds 4 GB. Their fix for a chat client consuming four gigabytes of RAM is to quietly reboot it. Rather creative, that.
Microsoft Teams: 1 to 2 GB idle. In November 2025, Microsoft admitted it “eats RAM on Windows doing nothing.” Their fix was another process. One rather admires the symmetry: solving a resource problem by adding resources.
VS Code: 180 MB empty. 890 MB with extensions. Sublime Text does the same job in 20 MB.
1Password 8 replaced a native macOS application that worked beautifully with an Electron rewrite. RAM: 2.5 times higher. The password manager now needs more resources than the passwords it manages.
Open Slack, Discord, VS Code, and Teams simultaneously. Four separate Chromium instances. Four browsers. None of them displaying a web page.
The Disk Invoice
Each Electron application bundles approximately 150 MB of Chromium. A “Hello World” Electron application: 150 MB on disk. Before it does anything. Before it renders a single pixel of your interface. One hundred and fifty megabytes of browser engine to display a window that says hello.
Four Electron applications: 600 MB of redundant browser engine before you open a single file. The framework has an open issue from 2016 requesting shared Chromium across applications. Still unresolved. Ten years. The problem is known. It is simply not profitable to solve.
The Mechanism
Web developers outnumber native developers by orders of magnitude. Cheaper to hire, faster to ship, easier to recruit. The company saves on engineering. The user pays in RAM, battery life, and disk space. This is the exchange. It is never stated explicitly, but it is the transaction at the heart of every Electron application.
The economics are rational. A native macOS developer costs more than a React developer. Maintaining three native codebases costs more than maintaining one web codebase. The arithmetic is correct. The invoice is simply addressed to the wrong party.
The Signal
mIRC handled chat in 40 MB. Discord needs 500. Same function. Twelve times the cost. The difference is not features. It is Chromium.
Zed, a code editor written in Rust, starts in 0.12 seconds and uses 45 MB. VS Code starts in 1.2 seconds and uses 180 MB. That is before opening a project. With extensions, VS Code reaches 890 MB. Zed: 140 MB. The difference is not features. It is the absence of a bundled browser.
The Alternative
The answer is not “learn native development for three platforms.” The answer is Tauri. Same HTML, CSS, JavaScript frontend. Same web skills. But Tauri uses the operating system's native WebView instead of bundling Chromium. Installer: 2.5 MB instead of 85 MB. One codebase, all platforms, no bundled browser.
Even Microsoft noticed. In 2023, they abandoned Electron for Teams and rebuilt it on Edge WebView2. Twice as fast, 50 per cent less memory. They did not need to rewrite the frontend. They simply stopped shipping their own browser with every installation.
The Timeline
The Pattern
Electron is not a bad idea. For a small team building an internal tool, it is a perfectly reasonable trade-off. Ship fast, iterate, move on. The problem is not the framework. The problem is that billion-dollar companies with thousands of engineers use it because hiring web developers is cheaper than hiring native developers, then pass the performance bill to the user.
The pattern is always the same: a tool designed for convenience at small scale becomes an industry default at large scale, and the costs that were acceptable for a prototype become intolerable for software used by hundreds of millions of people. Discord has 200 million monthly active users. Their chat client auto-restarts when it exceeds 4 GB of RAM. This is not a prototype. This is a product.
Every Electron app ships its own copy of Chromium. Four apps, four browsers, none displaying a web page. The company saves on engineering. The user pays in RAM, battery, and disk space. The invoice is addressed to the wrong party.
Tauri proves the alternative exists. Same web skills, same frontend code, 34 times smaller installer. Microsoft proved it too, when they rebuilt Teams and halved the memory footprint by simply not shipping their own browser.
And yet, your laptop still runs six browser instances. None of them displaying a web page.
Do bring your own RAM. The black market still has stock, I am told.