Microsoft Teams is ditching Electron and hopefully more projects follow suit

It’s no surprise that Electron is a slow, poor performing memory hog. However, the value proposition here is that it allows you to distribute Web-based applications as native desktop apps without writing programming code or anything else non-web.

For some reason, all of these work chat/productivity apps decided to use Electron. Perhaps the most notable is Slack which continues to be a steaming pile of garbage in itself.

When Electron first arrived, it was actually a game-changer for desktop app development. Despite its flaws, companies including Microsoft flocked to it. However, over the years, it has started to show its age. This is why it is not surprising that Microsoft Teams is ditching Electron for Edge Webview2 in its 2.0 release due out soon.

Ask any developer who has had the misfortune of working with Electron, it has serious issues and despite best attempts to improve Electron, it continues to be a resource hog.

I have never actually used Edge Webview2 (I didn’t even know it existed), but I am curious about how it performs. Something tells me that it’s not hard to beat Electron in the performance department. Everything looks like a 10 when you’re starting from 0.

Despite the fact Visual Studio Code still uses Electron and manages to perform well, I have hopes that more projects like VSCode follow suit and we can finally kill Electron off once and for all.