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How to make your Electron app faster 🚀⚡

Antoni Kępiński on August 11, 2019

So you just made a nice & shiny new app with Electron. It works as expected, has a beautiful UI, eats a lot of RAM and is slow, right? ...
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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

Now the question is how we make our Electron apps smaller 😂

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Cosmin Aruxandei

I think you cannot make Electron apps smaller unless you're not using Electron anymore. I am thinking there should be a possibility on creating an installable PWA that only needs internet connection in order to install and that's it. Just a thought. Haven't done it, but I think it's possible [with some workarounds].

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Pedro Luz

use Tauri

tauri.studio

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Muhammad Hasnain

Since, it bundles Chromium and V8 engine with your app, you cannot reduce its size.

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Muhammad Hasnain • Edited

Carlo felt like a much better approach but I find the same problems with it.

  1. No longer maintained.
  2. Reduces size but still uses Chrome which isn't any better.
  3. Like you mentioned, what if the user don't have Chrome installed.
  4. Most app ideas are small in scope and the tips you provide will not have an impact on the performance. (For instance, I was thinking about a screenshot app with basic drawing and cropping capabilities as there is no native or a reliable free app that I know of)

I guess we're just simply stuck. I was thinking about creating a screenshot application but a 120 MBs screenshot app with Electron doesn't looks like it is worth it. I did use an Electron based screen recorder and it is pretty famous. It was way too slow and I had to remove it.

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Sam

Carlo is no longer maintained

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Tiago Rangel • Edited

Instead of Carlo, I highly recommend Neutralino. It lacks some of Electron's features, but instead of bundling Chromium or looking for Chrome it uses the OS' built-in browser (for example, in Windows, edge, or Safari in Mac)

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Jacob Herrington (he/him)

Thanks for sharing Antoni. I hadn't heard about Carlo yet, will be investigating it. 🤠

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At Indo

I think the most promising alternative for Electron right now is Tauri.

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Víctor Villalobos

Excellent post.