El primer commit en el repositorio electron/electron fue el 13 de marzo de 2013¹.

10 años y 27.147 commits más de 1192 colaboradores únicos después, Electron se ha convertido en uno de los frameworks más populares para crear aplicaciones de escritorio hoy en día. Este hito es la oportunidad perfecta para celebrar y reflexionar sobre nuestro viaje hasta ahora, y para compartir lo que hemos aprendido en el camino.

No estaríamos aquí hoy sin todos los que han dedicado su tiempo y esfuerzo a contribuir al proyecto. Aunque los commits del código fuente son siempre las contribuciones más visibles, también tenemos que reconocer el esfuerzo de la gente que informa de errores, mantiene módulos de usuario, proporciona documentación y traducciones, y participa en la comunidad Electron a través del ciberespacio. Cada contribución tiene un valor incalculable para nosotros como mantenedores.

Antes de continuar con el resto de la entrada del blog: gracias. ❤️

¿Cómo hemos llegado hasta aquí?​

Atom Shell se construyó como la columna vertebral para el editor Atomde GitHub, que se lanzó en beta pública en abril de 2014. Se construyó desde cero como alternativa a los frameworks de escritorio basados en web disponibles en ese momento (node-webkit y Chromium Embedded Framework). Tenía una característica estrella: contiene Node.js y Chromium para proporcionar un potente tiempo de ejecución de escritorio para tecnologías web.

Al cabo de un año, Atom Shell empezó a crecer enormemente en capacidades y popularidad. Grandes compañías, startups y desarrolladores individuales habían empezado a construir aplicaciones con él (algunos de los primeros adoptores incluyen Slack, GitKraken, y WebTorrent), y el proyecto fue renombrado correctamente a Electron.

Desde entonces, Electron no ha parado de crecer. Aquí tienes un vistazo a nuestro recuento semanal de descargas con el tiempo, cortesía de npmtrends.com:

Electron v1 se lanzó en 2016, prometiendo una mayor estabilidad de la API y mejores documentos y herramientas. Electron v2 se lanzó en 2018 e introdujo el versionado semántico, lo que facilita a los desarrolladores de Electron a los desarrolladores hacer un seguimiento del ciclo de lanzamiento.

En Electron v6, cambiamos a una cadencia regular de lanzamientos principales de 12 semanas para ajustarnos a la de Chromium. Esta decisión supuso un cambio de mentalidad para el proyecto, haciendo que "tener la versión más actualizada de Chromium" pasara de ser un "nice-to-have" a una prioridad. Esto ha reducido la cantidad de deuda técnica entre actualizaciones, lo que nos facilita mantener Electron actualizado y seguro.

Desde entonces, hemos sido una máquina bien engrasada, lanzando una nueva versión de Electron el mismo día que cada versión estable de Chromium. Cuando Chromium aceleró su calendario de lanzamientos a 4 semanas en 2021, pudimos encogernos de hombros y aumentar nuestra cadencia de lanzamiento a 8 semanas.

Ahora estamos en Electron v23 (y contando), y seguimos dedicados a construir el mejor tiempo de ejecución para aplicaciones de escritorio multiplataforma. Incluso con el auge de las herramientas para desarrolladores de JavaScript en desarrolladores de JavaScript en los últimos años, Electron se ha mantenido estable y ha de escritorio. Electron apps are ubiquitous nowadays: you can program with Visual Studio Code, design with Figma, communicate with Slack, and take notes with Notion (amongst many other use cases). We’re incredibly proud of this achievement and grateful to everyone who has made it possible.

What did we learn along the way?​

The road to the decade mark has been long and winding. Here are some key things that have helped us run a sustainable large open source project.

Scaling distributed decision-making with a governance model​

One challenge we had to overcome was handling the long-term direction of the project once Electron first exploded in popularity. How do we handle being a team of a couple dozen engineers distributed across companies, countries, and time zones?

In the early days, Electron’s maintainer group relied on informal coordination, which is fast and lightweight for smaller projects, but doesn’t scale to wider collaboration. In 2019, we shifted to a governance model where different working groups have formal areas of responsibility. This has been instrumental in streamlining processes and assigning portions of project ownership to specific maintainers. What is each Working Group (WG) responsible for nowadays?

• Getting Electron releases out the door (Releases WG)
• Upgrading Chromium and Node.js (Upgrades WG)
• Overseeing public API design (API WG)
• Keeping Electron secure (Security WG)
• Running the website, documentation, and tooling (Ecosystem WG)
• Community and corporate outreach (Outreach WG)
• Community moderation (Community & Safety WG)
• Maintaining our build infrastructure, maintainer tools, and cloud services (Infrastructure WG)

Around the same time we shifted to the governance model, we also moved Electron's ownership from GitHub to the OpenJS Foundation. Although the original core team still works at Microsoft today, they are only a part of a larger group of collaborators that form Electron governance.

While this model isn’t perfect, it has suited us well through a global pandemic and ongoing macroeconomic headwinds. Going forward, we plan on revamping the governance charter to guide us through the second decade of Electron.

Comunidad​

The community part of open source is hard, especially when your Outreach team is a dozen engineers in a trench coat that says “community manager”. That said, being a large open source project means that we have a lot of users, and harnessing their energy for Electron to build a userland ecosystem is a crucial part of sustaining project health.

What have we been doing to develop our community presence?

Building virtual communities​

• In 2020, we launched our community Discord server. We previously had a section in Atom’s forum, but decided to have a more informal messaging platform to have a space for discussions between maintainers and Electron developers and for general debugging help.
• In 2021, we established the Electron China user group with the help of @BlackHole1. This group has been instrumental in Electron growth in users from China’s booming tech scene, providing a space for them to collaborate on ideas and discuss Electron outside of our English-language spaces. We’d also like to thank cnpm for their work in supporting Electron’s nightly releases in their Chinese mirror for npm.

Participating in high-visibility open source programs​

• We have been celebrating Hacktoberfest every year since 2019. Hacktoberfest is yearly celebration of open source organized by DigitalOcean, and we get dozens of enthusiastic contributors every year looking to make their mark on open source software.
• In 2020, we participated in the initial iteration of Google Season of Docs, where we worked with @bandantonio to rework Electron’s new user tutorial flow.
• In 2022, we mentored a Google Summer of Code student for the first time. @aryanshridhar did some awesome work to refactor Electron Fiddle's core version loading logic and migrate its bundler to webpack.

Automate all the things!​

Today, Electron governance has about 30 active maintainers. Less than half of us are full-time contributors, which means that there’s a lot of work to go around. What’s our trick to keeping everything running smoothly? Our motto is that computers are cheap, and human time is expensive. In typical engineer fashion, we’ve developed a suite of automated support tooling to make our lives easier.

Not Goma​

The core Electron codebase is a behemoth of C++ code, and build times have always been a limiting factor in how fast we can ship bug fixes and new features. In 2020, we deployed Not Goma, a custom Electron-specific backend for Google’s Goma distributed compiler service. Not Goma processes compilation requests from authorized user’s machines and distributes the process across hundreds of cores in the backend. It also caches the compilation result so that someone else compiling the same files will only need to download the pre-compiled result.

Since launching Not Goma, compilation times for maintainers have decreased from the scale of hours to minutes. A stable internet connection became the minimum requirement for contributors to compile Electron!

Continuous Factor Authentication​

Continuous Factor Authentication (CFA) is a layer of automation around npm’s two-factor authentication (2FA) system that we combine with semantic-release to manage secure and automated releases of our various @electron/ npm packages.

While semantic-release already automates the npm package publishing process, it requires turning off two-factor authentication or passing in a secret token that bypasses this restriction.

We built CFA to deliver a time-based one-time password (TOTP) for npm 2FA to arbitrary CI jobs, allowing us to harness the automation of semantic-release while keeping the additional security of two-factor authentication.

We use CFA with a Slack integration front-end, allowing maintainers to validate package publishing from any device they have Slack on, as long as they have their TOTP generator handy.

Sheriff​

Sheriff is an open source tool we wrote to automate the management of permissions across GitHub, Slack, and Google Workspace.

Sheriff’s key value proposition is that permission management should be a transparent process. It uses a single YAML config file that designates permissions across all the above listed services. With Sheriff, getting collaborator status on a repo or creating a new mailing list is as easy as getting a PR approved and merged.

Sheriff also has an audit log that posts to Slack, warning admins when suspicious activity occurs anywhere in the Electron organization.

…and all our GitHub bots​

GitHub is a platform with rich API extensibility and a first-party bot application framework called Probot. To help us focus on the more creative parts of our job, we built out a suite of smaller bots that help do the dirty work for us. Here are a few examples:

• Sudowoodo automates the Electron release process from start to finish, from kicking off builds to uploading the release assets to GitHub and npm.
• Trop automates the backporting process for Electron by attempting to cherry-pick patches to previous release branches based on GitHub PR labels.
• Roller automates rolling upgrades of Electron’s Chromium and Node.js dependencies.
• Cation is our status check bot for electron/electron PRs.

Altogether, our little family of bots has given us a huge boost in developer productivity!

¿Qué sigue?​

As we enter our second decade as a project, you might be asking: what’s next for Electron?

We’re going to stay in sync with Chromium's release cadence, releasing new major versions of Electron every 8 weeks, keeping the framework updated with the latest and greatest from the web platform and Node.js while maintaining stability and security for enterprise-grade applications.

We generally announce news on upcoming initiatives when they become concrete. If you want to keep up with future releases, features, and general project updates, you can read our blog and follow our social media profiles (Twitter and Mastodon)!

¡Electron 23.0.0 ha sido liberado! Incluye actualizaciones a Chromium 110, V8 11.0, y Node.js 18.12.1. Additionally, support for Windows 7/8/8.1 has been dropped. ¡Lea a continuación para más detalles!

El equipo de Electron esta emocionado de anunciar el lanzamiento de Electron 23.0.0! 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 join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 110
  • Nuevo en Chrome 110
  • Nuevo en Chrome 109
  • New in DevTools 110
  • New in DevTools 109
• Node.js 18.12.1
  • Node 18.12.1 blog post
• V8 11.0

Nuevas características​

• Added label property to Display objects. #36933
• Added an app.getPreferredSystemLanguages() API to return the user's system languages. #36035
• Added support for the WebUSB API. #36289
• Added support for SerialPort.forget() as well as a new event serial-port-revoked emitted on Session objects when a given origin is revoked. #35310
• Added new win.setHiddenInMissionControl API to allow developers to opt out of Mission Control on macOS. #36092

Dropping Windows 7/8/8.1 Support​

Electron 23 no longer supports Windows 7/8/8.1. Electron follows the planned Chromium deprecation policy, which will deprecate Windows 7/8/8.1 , as well as Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 support in Chromium 109 (read more here).

Rupturas de cambios de la API​

Below are breaking changes introduced in Electron 23. You can read more about these changes and future changes on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

Eliminado: eventos BrowserWindow scroll-touch-*​

The deprecated scroll-touch-begin, scroll-touch-end and scroll-touch-edge events on BrowserWindow have been removed. Instead, use the newly available input-event event on WebContents.

// Removed in Electron 23.0
-win.on('scroll-touch-begin', scrollTouchBegin)
-win.on('scroll-touch-edge', scrollTouchEdge)
-win.on('scroll-touch-end', scrollTouchEnd)

// Replace with
+win.webContents.on('input-event', (_, event) => {
+  if (event.type === 'gestureScrollBegin') {
+    scrollTouchBegin()
+  } else if (event.type === 'gestureScrollUpdate') +{
+    scrollTouchEdge()
+  } else if (event.type === 'gestureScrollEnd') {
+    scrollTouchEnd()
+  }
+})

Fin de soporte para 20.x.y​

Electron 20.x.y ha alcanzado el fin de soporte según la política de soporte del proyecto. 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.

¡Electron 22.0.0 ha sido liberado! It includes a new utility process API, updates for Windows 7/8/8.1 support, and upgrades to Chromium 108, V8 10.8, and Node.js 16.17.1. ¡Lea a continuación para más detalles!

El equipo de Electron esta emocionado de anunciar el lanzamiento de Electron 22.0.0! 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 join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 108
  • Nuevo en Chrome 108
  • Nuevo en Chrome 107
  • New in DevTools 108
  • New in DevTools 107
• Node.js 16.17.1
  • Node 16.17.1 blog post
• V8 10.8

Highlighted Features​

UtilityProcess API #36089​

The new UtilityProcess main process module allows the creation of a lightweight Chromium child process with only Node.js integration while also allowing communication with a sandboxed renderer using MessageChannel. The API was designed based on Node.js child_process.fork to allow for easier transition, with one primary difference being that the entry point modulePath must be from within the packaged application to allow only for trusted scripts to be loaded. Additionally the module prevents establishing communication channels with renderers by default, upholding the contract in which the main process is the only trusted process in the application.

You can read more about the new UtilityProcess API in our docs here.

Windows 7/8/8.1 Support Update​

Electron 22 will be the last Electron major version to support Windows 7/8/8.1. Electron follows the planned Chromium deprecation policy, which will deprecate Windows 7/8/8.1 support in Chromium 109 (read more here).

Windows 7/8/8.1 will not be supported in Electron 23 and later major releases.

Additional Highlighted Changes​

• Added support for Web Bluetooth pin pairing on Linux and Windows. #35416
• Added LoadBrowserProcessSpecificV8Snapshot as a new fuse that will let the main/browser process load its v8 snapshot from a file at browser_v8_context_snapshot.bin. Any other process will use the same path as is used today. #35266
• Added WebContents.opener to access window opener and webContents.fromFrame(frame) to get the WebContents corresponding to a WebFrameMain instance. #35140
• Added support for navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia via a new session handler, ses.setDisplayMediaRequestHandler. #30702

Rupturas de cambios de la API​

Below are breaking changes introduced in Electron 22. You can read more about these changes and future changes on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

Obsoleto: webContents.incrementCapturerCount(stayHidden, stayAwake)​

webContents.incrementCapturerCount(stayHidden, stayAwake) has been deprecated. It is now automatically handled by webContents.capturePage when a page capture completes.

const w = new BrowserWindow({ show: false })

- w.webContents.incrementCapturerCount()
- w.capturePage().then(image => {
-   console.log(image.toDataURL())
-   w.webContents.decrementCapturerCount()
- })

+ w.capturePage().then(image => {
+   console.log(image.toDataURL())
+ })

Obsoleto: webContents.decrementCapturerCount(stayHidden, stayAwake)​

webContents.decrementCapturerCount(stayHidden, stayAwake) has been deprecated. It is now automatically handled by webContents.capturePage when a page capture completes.

const w = new BrowserWindow({ show: false })

- w.webContents.incrementCapturerCount()
- w.capturePage().then(image => {
-   console.log(image.toDataURL())
-   w.webContents.decrementCapturerCount()
- })

+ w.capturePage().then(image => {
+   console.log(image.toDataURL())
+ })

Eliminado: evento new-window de Webcontens​

El evento new-window de WebContents ha sido eliminado. Es reemplazado por webContents.setWindowOpenHandler().

- webContents.on('new-window', (event) => {
-   event.preventDefault()
- })

+ webContents.setWindowOpenHandler((details) => {
+   return { action: 'deny' }
+ })

Eliminado: eventos scroll-touch-* de BrowserWindow​

Los eventos scroll-touch-begin, scroll-touch-end y scroll-touch-edge en BrowserWindow están deprecados. En su lugar, utiliza el nuevo evento disponible input-event en WebContents.

// Deprecated
- win.on('scroll-touch-begin', scrollTouchBegin)
- win.on('scroll-touch-edge', scrollTouchEdge)
- win.on('scroll-touch-end', scrollTouchEnd)

// Replace with
+ win.webContents.on('input-event', (_, event) => {
+   if (event.type === 'gestureScrollBegin') {
+     scrollTouchBegin()
+   } else if (event.type === 'gestureScrollUpdate') {
+     scrollTouchEdge()
+   } else if (event.type === 'gestureScrollEnd') {
+     scrollTouchEnd()
+   }
+ })

Fin de soporte para 19.x.y​

Electron 19.x.y ha alcanzado el fin de soporte según la política de soporte del proyecto. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

What's Next​

The Electron project will pause for the the month of December 2022, and return in January 2023. More information can be found in the December shutdown blog post.

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.

Electron will end support of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 beginning in Electron 23.

In line with Chromium’s deprecation policy, Electron will end support of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 beginning in Electron 23. This matches Microsoft's end of support for Windows 7 ESU and Windows 8.1 extended on January 10th, 2023.

Electron 22 will be the last Electron major version to support Windows versions older than 10. Windows 7/8/8.1 will not be supported in Electron 23 and later major releases. Older versions of Electron will continue to function on Windows 7, and we will continue to release patches for Electron the 22.x series until May 30 2023, when Electron will end support for 22.x (according to our support timeline).

Why deprecate?​

Electron follows the planned Chromium deprecation policy, which will deprecate support in Chromium 109 (read more about Chromium's timeline here). Electron 23 will contain Chromium 110, which won’t support older versions of Windows.

Electron 22, which contains Chromium 108, will thus be the last supported version.

Línea del tiempo de la obsoletización​

The following is our planned deprecation timeline:

• December 2022: The Electron team is entering a quiet period for the holidays
• January 2023: Windows 7 & 8 related issues are accepted for all supported release branches.
• February 7 2023: Electron 23 is released.
• February 8 2023 - May 29 2023: Electron will continue to accept fixes for supported lines older than Electron 23.
• May 30 2023: Electron 22 reaches the end of its support cycle.

What this means for developers:

• The Electron team will accept issues and fixes related to Windows 7/8/8.1 for stable supported lines, until each line reaches the end of its support cycle.
  • This specifically applies to Electron 22, Electron 21 and Electron 20.
• New issues related to Windows 7/8/8.1 will be accepted for Electron versions older than Electron 23.
  • New issues will not be accepted for any newer release lines.
• Once Electron 22 has reached the end of its support cycle, all existing issues related to Windows 7/8/8.1 will be closed.

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.

The Electron project will pause for the month of December 2022, then return to full speed in January 2023.

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. No new Stable releases in December. No Nightly and Alpha releases for the last two weeks of December.
2. With few exceptions, no pull request reviews or merges.
3. No issue tracker updates on any repositories.
4. No Discord debugging help from maintainers.
5. No social media content updates.

Why is this happening?​

With the success of December Quiet Month 2021, we wanted to bring it back for 2022. December continues to be a quiet month for most companies, so we want to give our maintainers a chance to recharge. Everyone is looking forward to 2023, and we expect good things to come! We encourage other projects to consider similar measures.

We are excited to announce that Electron Forge v6.0.0 is now available! This release marks the first major release of Forge since 2018 and moves the project from electron-userland into the main electron organization on Github.

Keep on reading to see what's new and how your app can adopt Electron Forge!

What is Electron Forge?​

Electron Forge is a tool for packaging and distributing Electron applications. It unifies Electron's build tooling ecosystem into a single extensible interface so that anyone can jump right into making Electron apps.

Highlight features include:

• 📦 Application packaging and code signing
• 🚚 Customizable installers on Windows, macOS, and Linux (DMG, deb, MSI, PKG, AppX, etc.)
• ☁️ Automated publishing flow for cloud providers (GitHub, S3, Bitbucket, etc.)
• ⚡️ Easy-to-use boilerplate templates for webpack and TypeScript
• ⚙️ Native Node.js module support
• 🔌 Extensible JavaScript plugin API

What's new in v6?​

Completely rewritten​

From v1 to v5, Electron Forge was based on the now-discontinued electron-compile project. Forge 6 is a complete rewrite of the project with a new modular architecture that can be extended to meet any Electron application's needs.

In the past few years, Forge v6.0.0-beta has achieved feature parity with v5 and code churn has slowed down dramatically, making the tool ready for general adoption.

Officially supported​

Historically, Electron maintainers have been unopinionated about build tooling, leaving the task to various community packages. However, with Electron maturing as a project, it has become harder for new Electron developers to understand which tools they need to build and distribute their apps.

To help guide Electron developers in the distribution process, we have have decided to make Forge the official batteries-included build pipeline for Electron.

Over the past year, we have been slowly integrating Forge into the official Electron documentation, and we have recently moved Forge over from its old home in electron-userland/electron-forge to the electron/forge repo. Now, we are finally ready to release Electron Forge to a general audience!

Empezar​

Initializing a new Forge project​

Scaffolding a new Electron Forge project can be done using the create-electron-app CLI script.

yarn create electron-app my-app --template=webpack
cd my-app
yarn start

npm init electron-app@latest my-app -- --template=webpack
cd my-app
npm start

The script will create an Electron project in the my-app folder with completely JavaScript bundling and a preconfigured build pipeline.

For more info, see the Getting Started guide in the Forge docs.

Importing an existing project​

The Electron Forge CLI also contains an import command for existing Electron projects.

cd my-app
yarn add --dev @electron-forge/cli
yarn electron-forge import

cd my-app
npm install --save-dev @electron-forge/cli
npm exec --package=@electron-forge/cli -c "electron-forge import"

When you use the import command, Electron Forge will add a few core dependencies and create a new forge.config.js configuration. If you have any existing build tooling (e.g. Electron Packager, Electron Builder, or Forge 5), it will try to migrate as many settings as possible. Some of your existing configuration may need to be migrated manually.

Manual migration details can be found in the Forge import documentation. If you need help, please stop by our Discord server!

Why switch to Forge?​

If you already have tooling for packaging and publishing your Electron app, the benefits associated with adopting Electron Forge can still outweigh the initial switching cost.

We believe there are two main benefits to using Forge:

1. Forge receives new features for application building as soon as they are supported in Electron. In this case, you won't need to wire in new tooling support yourself, or wait for that support to be eventually implemented by other packages before upgrading. For recent examples, see macOS universal binaries and ASAR integrity checking.

2. Forge's multi-package architecture makes it easy to understand and extend. Since Forge is made up of many smaller packages with clear responsibilities, it is easier to follow code flow. In addition, Forge's extensible API design means that you can write your own additional build logic separate from the provided configuration options for advanced use cases. For more details on writing custom Forge plugins, makers, and publishers, see the Extending Electron Forge section of the docs.

Cambios notables​

Forge 6 has spent a long time in the beta phase, and its release cadence has gradually slowed down. However, we have accelerated development in the second half of 2022 and used the last few releases to push some final breaking changes before the v6.0.0 stable release.

If you are an Electron Forge 6 beta user, see the v6.0.0 GitHub release notes for a list of breaking changes made in recent betas (>=6.0.0-beta.65).

A complete list of changes and commits can be found in the repo's CHANGELOG.md.

Submit your feedback!​

Tell us what you need! The Electron Forge team is always looking to build the project to better suit its users.

You can help us improve Electron Forge by submitting feature requests, posting issues, or just letting us know your feedback! You can also join us in the official Electron Discord server, where there is a dedicated channel for Electron Forge discussion.

If you want to give any feedback on the Forge docs at https://electronforge.io, we have a GitBook instance synced to the electron-forge/electron-forge-docs repo.

El mes pasado, el grupo encargado de mantener Electron se reunió en Vancouver, Canadá para discutir la dirección del proyecto para el 2023 y más adelante. Durante cuatro días, en una sala de conferencias, los encargados del mantenimiento del núcleo y los colaboradores invitados debatieron sobre las nuevas iniciativas, los problemas de mantenimiento y el estado general del proyecto. invitados debatieron nuevas iniciativas, problemas de mantenimiento y la salud general del proyecto.

En el futuro, el equipo todavía está totalmente dedicado a lanzar rápidas y normales actualizaciones de Chromium, arreglando fallos, y haciendo Electron más seguro y eficiente para todos. ¡También estamos trabajando en algunos proyectos interesantes que nos gustaría compartir con la comunidad!

Nuevas API transformativas​

Las principales propuestas de API en el proyecto Electron que requieren consenso pasan por un proceso de solicitud de comentarios (RFC), que revisan los miembros de nuestro grupo de trabajo sobre API.

Este año hemos impulsado dos importantes propuestas que tienen el potencial de desbloquear una nueva dimensión de capacidades para las aplicaciones Electron. Estas propuestas son muy experimentales, pero he aquí un de lo que puede esperar!

Nuevas mejoras de complemento nativo (C APIs)​

Esta propuesta esboza una nueva capa de APIs de Electron C que permitirá a los desarrolladores de aplicaciones escribir sus Native Node Addons que interactúen con los recursos internos de Electron, de forma similar a la propia Node-API de Node. de Node. Puede encontrar más información sobre la nueva API propuesta aquí.

Ejemplo: Supercargando aplicaciones con recursos de Chromium​

Muchas aplicaciones Electron mantienen sus propias bifurcaciones para interactuar directamente con las funciones internas de Chromium que, de otro modo, serían inaccesibles con Electron vainilla (sin modificar). Al exponer estos recursos en la capa API de C este código puede vivir como un módulo nativo junto con Electron, reduciendo potencialmente la carga de mantenimiento del desarrollador de aplicaciones.

Exposición de la capa UI de Chromium (Views API)​

Bajo el capó, las partes no web de la interfaz de usuario (IU) de Chrome, como las barras de herramientas, las pestañas o los botones, se construyen con un marco llamado Views. La propuesta de la API Views introduce partes de este marco como clases de JavaScript en Electron, con el objetivo final de permitir a los desarrolladores crear elementos de interfaz de usuario no web para sus aplicaciones Electron. Esto evitará que las aplicaciones tengan que piratear contenidos web.

Actualmente se están sentando las bases para hacer posible este nuevo conjunto de API. Estas son algunas de las primeras cosas que puede esperar en un futuro próximo.

Ejemplo: Refactorización del modelo de ventana con WebContentsView​

Nuestro primer cambio planeado es exponer WebContentsView de Chrome a la superficie API de Electron, que será la sucesora de nuestra actual API BrowserView (que, a pesar del nombre, es código específico de Electron no relacionado con Chromium Views). Con WebContentsView expuesto, tendremos un objeto View reutilizable que puede mostrar contenidos web, abriendo la puerta a convertir la clase BrowserWindow en JavaScript puro y eliminando aún más complejidad de código.

Aunque este cambio no aporta muchas funciones nuevas a los desarrolladores de aplicaciones, se trata de una gran refactorización que elimina mucho código bajo el capó, lo que simplifica las actualizaciones de Chromium y reduce el riesgo de que aparezcan nuevos errores entre versiones principales.

Si eres un desarrollador de Electron que utiliza BrowserViews en tu aplicación: no te preocupes, ¡no nos hemos olvidado de ti! Planeamos convertir la clase BrowserView existente en un shim para WebContentsView con el fin de proporcionar un amortiguador durante la transición a las nuevas API.

Ver: electron/electron#35658

Ejemplo: Contenido web desplazable con ScrollView​

Nuestros amigos de Stack han estado impulsando una iniciativa para exponer el componente ScrollView de Chromium a la API de Electron. Con esta nueva API, cualquier componente View hijo puede hacerse desplazable horizontal o verticalmente.

Aunque esta nueva API cumple una única funcionalidad menor, el objetivo final del equipo es construir un conjunto de componentes de utilidad de View que puedan utilizarse como conjunto de herramientas para construir interfaces no HTML más complejas.

Participar​

¿Es usted un desarrollador de aplicaciones Electron interesado en alguna de estas propuestas de API? Aunque aún no estamos preparados para recibir más RFC, manténgase atento para conocer más detalles en el futuro!

Electron Forge v6 versión estable​

Desde la creación del framework, el ecosistema de herramientas de compilación de Electron ha sido impulsado en gran medida por la comunidad y ha consistido en muchos paquetes pequeños de un solo propósito (por ejemplo, electron-winstaller, electron-packager, electron-notarize, electron-osx-sign). Aunque estas herramientas funcionan bien, a los usuarios les resulta intimidante montar un proceso de compilación que funcione.

Para ayudar a construir una experiencia más amigable para los desarrolladores de Electron, construimos Electron Forge, una solución todo en uno que combina todas estas herramientas existentes en una sola interfaz. Aunque Forge ha estado en desarrollo desde 2017, el proyecto ha permanecido inactivo durante los últimos años. Sin embargo, dada la retroalimentación de la comunidad sobre el estado de las herramientas de construcción en Electron, hemos estado trabajando duro para lanzar la versión principal estable de próxima generación de Forge.

Electron Forge 6 incluye compatibilidad de primera clase con TypeScript y Webpack, así como una API extensible que permite a los desarrolladores crear sus propios plugins e instaladores.

Mantente atento: anuncio próximamente​

Si te interesa crear un proyecto con Forge o crear plantillas o plugins con las API extensibles de terceros de Forge, estate atento a nuestro anuncio oficial sobre la versión estable de Forge v6 en algún momento de este mes!

¿Qué sigue?​

Aparte de lo anterior, el equipo siempre está pensando en un montón de proyectos exploratorios para hacer que la experiencia Electron sea mejor para los desarrolladores de aplicaciones y los usuarios finales. Estamos experimentando con herramientas de actualización, procesos de revisión de API y documentación mejorada. Esperamos tener más noticias que compartir en un futuro próximo!

¡Electron 21.0.0 ha sido liberado! Incluye actualizaciones a Chromium 106, V8 10.6, y Node.js 16.16.0. ¡Lea a continuación para más detalles!

El equipo de Electron esta emocionado de anunciar el lanzamiento de Electron 21.0.0! 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 join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 106
  • Nuevo en Chrome 106
  • Nuevo en Chrome 105
  • New in DevTools 106
  • New in DevTools 105
• Node.js 16.16.0
  • Node 16.16.0 blog post
• V8 10.6

Nuevas características​

• Se añadió webFrameMain.origin. #35534
• Added new WebContents.ipc and WebFrameMain.ipc APIs. #35231
• Added support for panel-like behavior. Window can float over full-screened apps. #34388
• Added support for push notifications from APNs for macOS apps. #33574

Breaking & API Changes​

Below are breaking changes introduced in Electron 21.

V8 Memory Cage Enabled​

Electron 21 enables V8 sandboxed pointers, following Chrome's decision to do the same in Chrome 103. This has some implications for native modules. This feature has performance and security benefits, but also places some new restrictions on native modules, e.g. use of ArrayBuffers that point to external ("off-heap") memory. Please see this blog post for more information. #34724

Refactored webContents.printToPDF​

Refactored webContents.printToPDF to align with Chromium's headless implementation. See #33654 for more information.

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

Fin de soporte para 18.x.y​

Electron 18.x.y ha alcanzado el fin de soporte según la política de soporte del proyecto. 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.

¡Electron 20.0.0 ha sido liberado! Incluye actualizaciones a Chromium 104, V8 10.4, y Node.js 16.15.0. ¡Lea a continuación para más detalles!

El equipo de Electron esta emocionado de anunciar el lanzamiento de Electron 20.0.0! 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 and please share any feedback you have!

Notable Changes​

Nuevas características​

• Added immersive dark mode on Windows. #34549
• Added support for panel-like behavior. Window can float over full-screened apps. #34665
• Updated Windows Control Overlay buttons to look and feel more native on Windows 11. #34888
• Renderers are now sandboxed by default unless nodeIntegration: true or sandbox: false is specified. #35125
• Added safeguards when building native modules with nan. #35160

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 104
  • Nuevo en Chrome 104
  • Nuevo en Chrome 103
  • Nuevo en DevTools
• Node.js 16.15.0
  • Node 16.15.0 blog post
• V8 10.4

Breaking & API Changes​

Below are breaking changes introduced in Electron 20. More information about these and future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

Default Changed: renderers without nodeIntegration: true are sandboxed by default​

Previously, renderers that specified a preload script defaulted to being unsandboxed. This meant that by default, preload scripts had access to Node.js. En Electron 20, este comportamiento ha cambiado. Beginning in Electron 20, renderers will be sandboxed by default, unless nodeIntegration: true or sandbox: false is specified.

If your preload scripts do not depend on Node, no action is needed. If your preload scripts do depend on Node, either refactor them to remove Node usage from the renderer, or explicitly specify sandbox: false for the relevant renderers.

Fixed: spontaneous crashing in nan native modules​

In Electron 20, we changed two items related to native modules:

1. V8 headers now use c++17 by default. This flag was added to electron-rebuild.
2. We fixed an issue where a missing include would cause spontaneous crashing in native modules that depended on nan.

For the most stability, we recommend using node-gyp >=8.4.0 and electron-rebuild >=3.2.9 when rebuilding native modules, particularly modules that depend on nan. See electron #35160 and node-gyp #2497 for more information.

Eliminado: .skipTaskbar en Linux​

On X11, skipTaskbar sends a _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR message to the X11 window manager. There is not a direct equivalent for Wayland, and the known workarounds have unacceptable tradeoffs (e.g. Window.is_skip_taskbar in GNOME requires unsafe mode), so Electron is unable to support this feature on Linux.

Fin de soporte para 17.x.y​

Electron 17.x.y ha alcanzado el fin de soporte según la política de soporte del proyecto. 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. Although we are careful not to make promises about release dates, our plan is to release new major versions of Electron with new versions of those components approximately every 2 months.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

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

Electron 21 and later will have the V8 Memory Cage enabled, with implications for some native modules.

In Electron 21, we will be enabling V8 sandboxed pointers in Electron, following Chrome's decision to do the same in Chrome 103. This has some implications for native modules. Also, we previously enabled a related technology, pointer compression, in Electron 14. We didn't talk about it much then, but pointer compression has implications for the maximum V8 heap size.

These two technologies, when enabled, are significantly beneficial for security, performance and memory usage. However, there are some downsides to enabling them, too.

The main downside of enabling sandboxed pointers is that ArrayBuffers which point to external ("off-heap") memory are no longer allowed. This means that native modules which rely on this functionality in V8 will need to be refactored to continue working in Electron 20 and later.

The main downside of enabling pointer compression is that the V8 heap is limited to a maximum size of 4GB. The exact details of this are a little complicated—for example, ArrayBuffers are counted separately from the rest of the V8 heap, but have their own limits.

The Electron Upgrades Working Group believes that the benefits of pointer compression and the V8 memory cage outweigh the downsides. There are three main reasons for doing so:

1. It keeps Electron closer to Chromium. The less Electron diverges from Chromium in complex internal details such as V8 configuration, the less likely we are to accidentally introduce bugs or security vulnerabilities. Chromium's security team is formidable, and we want to make sure we are taking advantage of their work. Further, if a bug only affects configurations that aren't used in Chromium, fixing it is not likely to be a priority for the Chromium team.
2. It performs better. Pointer compression reduces V8 heap size by up to 40% and improves CPU and GC performance by 5%–10%. For the vast majority of Electron applications which won't bump into the 4GB heap size limit and don't use native modules that require external buffers, these are significant performance wins.
3. It's more secure. Some Electron apps run untrusted JavaScript (hopefully following our security recommendations!), and for those apps, having the V8 memory cage enabled protects them from a large class of nasty V8 vulnerabilities.

Lastly, there are workarounds for apps that really need a larger heap size. For example, it is possible to include a copy of Node.js with your app, which is built with pointer compression disabled, and move the memory-intensive work to a child process. Though somewhat complicated, it is also possible to build a custom version of Electron with pointer compression disabled, if you decide you want a different trade-off for your particular use case. And lastly, in the not-too-distant future, wasm64 will allow apps built with WebAssembly both on the Web and in Electron to use significantly more than 4GB of memory.

Preguntas más frecuentes​

How will I know if my app is impacted by this change?​

Attempting to wrap external memory with an ArrayBuffer will crash at runtime in Electron 20+.

If you don't use any native Node modules in your app, you're safe—there's no way to trigger this crash from pure JS. This change only affects native Node modules which allocate memory outside of the V8 heap (e.g. using malloc or new) and then wrap the external memory with an ArrayBuffer. This is a fairly rare use case, but some modules do use this technique, and such modules will need to be refactored in order to be compatible with Electron 20+.

How can I measure how much V8 heap memory my app is using to know if I'm close to the 4GB limit?​

In the renderer process, you can use performance.memory.usedJSHeapSize, which will return the V8 heap usage in bytes. In the main process, you can use process.memoryUsage().heapUsed, which is comparable.

What is the V8 memory cage?​

Some documents refer to it as the "V8 sandbox", but that term is easily confusable with other kinds of sandboxing that happen in Chromium, so I'll stick to the term "memory cage".

There's a fairly common kind of V8 exploit that goes something like this:

1. Find a bug in V8's JIT engine. JIT engines analyze code in order to be able to omit slow runtime type checks and produce fast machine code. Sometimes logic errors mean it gets this analysis wrong, and omits a type check that it actually needed—say, it thinks x is a string, but in fact it's an object.
2. Abuse this confusion to overwrite some bit of memory inside the V8 heap, for instance, the pointer to the beginning of an ArrayBuffer.
3. Now you have an ArrayBuffer that points wherever you like, so you can read and write any memory in the process, even memory that V8 normally doesn't have access to.

The V8 memory cage is a technique designed to categorically prevent this kind of attack. The way this is accomplished is by not storing any pointers in the V8 heap. Instead, all references to other memory inside the V8 heap are stored as offsets from the beginning of some reserved region. Then, even if an attacker manages to corrupt the base address of an ArrayBuffer, for instance by exploiting a type confusion error in V8, the worst they can do is read and write memory inside the cage, which they could likely already do anyway. There's a lot more available to read on how the V8 memory cage works, so I won't go into further detail here—the best place to start reading is probably the high-level design doc from the Chromium team.

I want to refactor a Node native module to support Electron 21+. How do I do that?​

There are two ways to go about refactoring a native module to be compatible with the V8 memory cage. The first is to copy externally-created buffers into the V8 memory cage before passing them to JavaScript. This is generally a simple refactor, but it can be slow when the buffers are large. The other approach is to use V8's memory allocator to allocate memory which you intend to eventually pass to JavaScript. This is a bit more involved, but will allow you to avoid the copy, meaning better performance for large buffers.

To make this more concrete, here's an example N-API module that uses external array buffers:

// Create some externally-allocated buffer.
// |create_external_resource| allocates memory via malloc().
size_t length = 0;
void* data = create_external_resource(&length);
// Wrap it in a Buffer--will fail if the memory cage is enabled!
napi_value result;
napi_create_external_buffer(
    env, length, data,
    finalize_external_resource, NULL, &result);

This will crash when the memory cage is enabled, because data is allocated outside the cage. Refactoring to instead copy the data into the cage, we get:

size_t length = 0;
void* data = create_external_resource(&length);
// Create a new Buffer by copying the data into V8-allocated memory
napi_value result;
void* copied_data = NULL;
napi_create_buffer_copy(env, length, data, &copied_data, &result);
// If you need to access the new copy, |copied_data| is a pointer
// to it!

This will copy the data into a newly-allocated memory region that is inside the V8 memory cage. Optionally, N-API can also provide a pointer to the newly-copied data, in case you need to modify or reference it after the fact.

Refactoring to use V8's memory allocator is a little more complicated, because it requires modifying the create_external_resource function to use memory allocated by V8, instead of using malloc. This may be more or less feasible, depending on whether or not you control the definition of create_external_resource. The idea is to first create the buffer using V8, e.g. with napi_create_buffer, and then initialize the resource into the memory that has been allocated by V8. It is important to retain a napi_ref to the Buffer object for the lifetime of the resource, otherwise V8 may garbage-collect the Buffer and potentially result in use-after-free errors.