At OpenJS World this morning, we announced that Electron has officially graduated from the OpenJS Foundation's incubation program, and is now an OpenJS Foundation Impact Project.

Electron entered incubation in December of 2019, at the last OpenJS Foundation global conference in Montreal. We're excited to take a larger role in the JavaScript community as an Impact Project, and continue our partnership with the OpenJS Foundation.

Learning more​

You can read up on the foundation, its mission, and its members on the OpenJSF website. The OpenJS Foundation is host to a number of open source JavaScript projects including jQuery, Node.js, and webpack. It's supported by 30 corporate and end-user members, including GoDaddy, Google, IBM, Intel, Joyent, and Microsoft.

Electron is an open–source framework for building cross-platform desktop applications with web technologies. To learn more about the humans behind Electron and how they work together, take a look at our Governance page.

To get started with Electron itself, take a peek at our documentation.

Electron is proud to be participating in the second edition of Google's Season of Docs initiative, which pairs mentors from open source organizations with technical writers to improve project documentation.

What is Season of Docs?

Season of Docs is a program that fosters collaboration between technical writers and open source communities to the benefit of both parties. Open source maintainers utilize the writer's technical writing expertise to improve the structure and content of their documentation, while the technical writer is introduced to an open-source community under the guidance of its mentors. Learn more about it on the Google's Season of Docs website.

For our first time participating in the program, we'll be mentoring a single technical writer who will be working alongside Electron's Ecosystem Working Group to reshape large parts of our documentation. You can learn more about the timeline of the whole project here.

How do I sign up?

Are you interested in collaborating with us as a technical writer? First, get familiar with Google's tech writer guide for this year's program, and check out the two project idea drafts that we have prepared.

In order to be selected as Electron's technical writer for Season of Docs, candidates will need to apply on the Google Season of Docs website during the Technical Writer Application phase that is running from June 8 to July 9..

Your application should include a proposal, which is a written document that describes in detail what you plan to achieve on the Electron docs over the course of 3 months. This proposal can either develop on one of the starting points mentioned in our Project Idea doc, or can be something entirely new. Don't know where to start? You can check out last year's list of accepted proposals for inspiration.

Aside from the proposal, we'll also be looking at your background as a technical writer. Please include a copy of your resume with an emphasis on relevant writing experience, as well as technical writing samples (these samples could be existing documentation, tutorial, blog posts, etc.)

If you want to discuss project proposals, shoot us an email at season-of-docs@electronjs.org and we can chat from there!

References

• Electron documentation
• Project ideas document
• Season of Docs tech writer guide

Electron 9.0.0 has been released! It includes upgrades to Chromium 83, V8 8.3, and Node.js 12.14. We've added several new API integrations for our spellchecker feature, enabled PDF viewer, and much more!

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 9.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. The release is packed with upgrades, fixes, and new features. We can't wait to see what you build with them! Continue reading for details about this release, and please share any feedback you have!

Notable Changes​

• Multiple improvements to the spellchecker feature. See more details in #22128 and #22368.
• Improved window events handler efficiency on Linux. #23260.
• Enable PDF viewer. #22131.

See the 9.0.0 release notes for a full list of new features and changes.

Electron is temporarily pausing major releases

What's Happening?​

Our major release cadence schedule moves in lockstep with that of Chromium, and the Chromium project has made the recent decision to pause its releases due to adjusted work schedules. This means that for the duration of Chromium's altered cadence, Electron will also temporarily pause new major releases.

We feel that our best choice is to follow in Chromium's footsteps, and so in the interim the Electron team will shift to full-time work on bugfixes, security, performance, and stability.

We want to ensure that both our maintainers and our consumers' wellbeing is prioritized during this time, so we welcome your feedback and look forward to returning to our regular release schedule.

For more updates, please follow our Twitter account.

Edit (2020-03-30): Electron 9 stable will target Chromium M83 and be released on May 19, 2020, in response to Chromium's announcement of skipping the M82 stable date and adjusting the M83 stable date.

Electron 8.0.0 has been released! It includes upgrades to Chromium 80, V8 8.0, and Node.js 12.13.0. We've added Chrome's built-in spellchecker, and much more!

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 8.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. The release is packed with upgrades, fixes, and new features. We can't wait to see what you build with them! Continue reading for details about this release, and please share any feedback you have!

Notable Changes​

• Implemented usage of Chrome's built-in spellchecker feature. See more details in #20692 and #21266.
• IPC communication now uses v8's Structured Clone Algorithm. This is faster, more featureful, and less surprising than the existing logic, and brings about a 2x performance boost for large buffers and complex objects. Latency for small messages is not significantly affected. See more details in #20214.

See the 8.0.0 release notes for a full list of new features and changes.

At Node+JS Interactive in Montreal, the OpenJS Foundation announced that it accepted Electron into the Foundation's incubation program. The Foundation is committed to supporting the healthy growth of the JavaScript ecosystem and web technologies by providing a neutral organization to host and sustain projects, as well as collaboratively fund activities for the benefit of the community at large.

The OpenJS Foundation is host to a number of open source JavaScript projects including jQuery, Node.js, and webpack. It's supported by 30 corporate and end-user members, including GoDaddy, Google, IBM, Intel, Joyent, and Microsoft. Electron is an open–source framework for building cross-platform desktop applications with web technologies.

This is an exciting move for Electron, and we see it as a next step in our evolution as an open-source project.

What this means for developers​

Electron joining the OpenJS Foundation does not change how Electron is made, released, or used — and does not directly affect developers building applications with Electron. Even though Electron was originally created at GitHub in 2013, it is currently maintained by a number of organizations and individuals. In 2019, Electron codified its governance structure and invested heavily into formalizing how decisions affecting the entire project are made. We believe that having multiple organizations and developers investing in and collaborating on Electron makes the project stronger.

Lifting Electron up from being owned by a single corporate entity and moving it into a neutral foundation focused on supporting the web and JavaScript ecosystem is a natural next step as we mature as an open-source project.

Learning more​

You can read up on the foundation, its mission, and its members on the OpenJSF website. For more information and quotes about the acceptance of Electron into the OpenJSF incubation program, check out the official press release. To learn more about the humans behind Electron and how they work together, take a look at our Governance page.

To get started with Electron itself, take a peek at our documentation.

A High severity vulnerability has been discovered in Chrome which affects all software based on Chromium, including Electron.

This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2019-13720. You can read more about it in the Chrome Blog Post.

Please note that Chrome has reports of this vulnerability being used in the wild so it is strongly recommended you upgrade Electron as soon as possible.

Scope​

This affects any Electron application that may run third-party or untrusted JavaScript.

Mitigation​

Affected apps should upgrade to a patched version of Electron.

We've published new versions of Electron which include fixes for this vulnerability:

• 6.1.4

Electron 7.0.1 automatically included the fix from upstream, before the announcement was made. Electron 8 is similarly unaffected. The vulnerability did not exist in Electron 5, so that version is also unaffected.

Further Information​

This vulnerability was discovered by Anton Ivanov and Alexey Kulaev at Kaspersky Labs and reported to the Chrome team. The Chrome blog post can be found here.

To learn more about best practices for keeping your Electron apps secure, see our security tutorial.

Please file a GitHub Security Advisory if you wish to report a vulnerability in Electron.

Electron 7.0.0 has been released! It includes upgrades to Chromium 78, V8 7.8, and Node.js 12.8.1. We've added a Window on Arm 64 release, faster IPC methods, a new nativeTheme API, and much more!

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 7.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. The release is packed with upgrades, fixes, and new features. We can't wait to see what you build with them! Continue reading for details about this release, and please share any feedback you have!

Notable Changes​

• Stack Upgrades:

  Stack	Version in Electron 6	Version in Electron 7	What's New
  Chromium	76.0.3809.146	78.0.3905.1	77, 78
  V8	7.6	7.8	7.7, 7.8
  Node.js	12.4.0	12.8.1	12.5, 12.6, 12.7, 12.8, 12.8.1

• Added Windows on Arm (64 bit) release. #18591, #20112

• Added ipcRenderer.invoke() and ipcMain.handle() for asynchronous request/response-style IPC. These are strongly recommended over the remote module. See this "Electron’s ‘remote’ module considered harmful" blog post for more information. #18449

• Added nativeTheme API to read and respond to changes in the OS's theme and color scheme. #19758, #20486

• Switched to a new TypeScript Definitions generator. The resulting definitions are more precise; so if your TypeScript build fails, this is the likely cause. #18103

See the 7.0.0 release notes for a longer list of changes.

Breaking Changes​

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

• Removed deprecated APIs:
  • Callback-based versions of functions that now use Promises. #17907
  • Tray.setHighlightMode() (macOS). #18981
  • app.enableMixedSandbox() #17894
  • app.getApplicationMenu(),
  • app.setApplicationMenu(),
  • powerMonitor.querySystemIdleState(),
  • powerMonitor.querySystemIdleTime(),
  • webFrame.setIsolatedWorldContentSecurityPolicy(),
  • webFrame.setIsolatedWorldHumanReadableName(),
  • webFrame.setIsolatedWorldSecurityOrigin() #18159
• Session.clearAuthCache() no longer allows filtering the cleared cache entries. #17970
• Native interfaces on macOS (menus, dialogs, etc.) now automatically match the dark mode setting on the user's machine. #19226
• Updated the electron module to use @electron/get. The minimum supported node version is now Node 8. #18413
• The file electron.asar no longer exists. Any packaging scripts that depend on its existence should be updated. #18577

End of Support for 4.x.y​

Electron 4.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

App Feedback Program​

We continue to use our App Feedback Program for testing. Projects who participate in this program test Electron betas on their apps; and in return, the new bugs they find are prioritized for the stable release. If you'd like to participate or learn more, check out our blog post about the program.

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 release new major versions of Electron with new versions of those components approximately quarterly. The tentative 8.0.0 schedule maps out key dates in the Electron 8 development life cycle. Also, see our versioning document for more detailed information about versioning in Electron.

For information on planned breaking changes in upcoming versions of Electron, see our Planned Breaking Changes doc.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 6.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. The release is packed with upgrades, fixes, and new features. We can't wait to see what you build with them! Continue reading for details about this release, and please share any feedback you have!

What's New​

Today marks a first for the Electron project: this is the first time we've made a stable Electron release on the same day as the corresponding Chrome stable release! 🎉

Much of Electron's functionality is provided by the core components of Chromium, Node.js, and V8. Electron keeps up-to-date with these projects to provide our users with new JavaScript features, performance improvements, and security fixes. Each of these packages has a major version bump in Electron 6:

• Chromium 76.0.3809.88
  • New in 74
  • New in 75
  • New in 76
• Node.js 12.4.0
  • Node 12.4.0 blog post
• V8 7.6.303.22
  • V8 7.6 blog post

This release also includes improvements to Electron's APIs. The release notes have a more complete list, but here are the highlights:

Promisification​

Electron 6.0 continues the modernization initiative started in 5.0 to improve Promise support.

These functions now return Promises and still support older callback-based invocation:

• contentTracing.getCategories() #16583
• contentTracing.getCategories() #16583
• contentTracing.getTraceBufferUsage() #16600
• contents.executeJavaScript() #17312
• cookies.flushStore() #16464
• cookies.get() #16464
• cookies.remove() #16464
• cookies.set() #16464
• dialog.showCertificateTrustDialog() #17181
• inAppPurchase.getProducts() #17355
• inAppPurchase.purchaseProduct()#17355
• netLog.stopLogging() #16862
• session.clearAuthCache() #17259
• session.clearCache() #17185
• session.clearHostResolverCache() #17229
• session.clearStorageData() #17249
• session.getBlobData() #17303
• session.getCacheSize() #17185
• session.resolveProxy() #17222
• session.setProxy() #17222
• webContents.hasServiceWorker() #16535
• webContents.printToPDF() #16795
• webContents.savePage() #16742
• webFrame.executeJavaScript() #17312
• webFrame.executeJavaScriptInIsolatedWorld() #17312
• webviewTag.executeJavaScript() #17312

These functions now have two forms, synchronous and Promise-based asynchronous:

• dialog.showMessageBox()/dialog.showMessageBoxSync() #17298
• dialog.showOpenDialog()/dialog.showOpenDialogSync() #16973
• dialog.showSaveDialog()/dialog.showSaveDialogSync() #17054

These functions now return Promises:

• app.dock.show() #16904

Electron Helper (Renderer).app, Electron Helper (GPU).app and Electron Helper (Plugin).app​

In order to enable the hardened runtime, which restricts things like writable-executable memory and loading code signed by a different Team ID, special code signing entitlements needed to be granted to the Helper.

To keep these entitlements scoped to the process types that require them, Chromium added three new variants of the Helper app: one for renderers (Electron Helper (Renderer).app), one for the GPU process (Electron Helper (GPU).app) and one for plugins (Electron Helper (Plugin).app).

Folks using electron-osx-sign to codesign their Electron app shouldn't have to make any changes to their build logic. If you're codesigning your app with custom scripts, you should ensure that the three new Helper applications are correctly codesigned.

In order to package your application correctly with these new helpers you need to be using electron-packager@14.0.4 or higher. If you are using electron-builder you should follow this issue to track support for these new helpers.

Breaking Changes​

• This release begins laying the groundwork for a future requirement that native Node modules loaded in the renderer process be either N-API or Context Aware. The reasons for this change are faster performance, stronger security, and reduced maintenance workload. Read the full details including the proposed timeline in this issue. This change is expected to be completed in Electron v11.

• net.IncomingMessage headers have changed slightly to more closely match Node.js behavior, particularly with the value of set-cookie and how duplicate headers are handled. #17517.

• shell.showItemInFolder() now returns void and is an asynchronous call. #17121

• Apps must now explicitly set a log path by calling the new function app.setAppLogPath() before using app.getPath('log'). #17841

End of Support for 3.x.y​

Per our support policy, 3.x.y has reached end of life. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

App Feedback Program​

We continue to use our App Feedback Program for testing. Projects who participate in this program test Electron betas on their apps; and in return, the new bugs they find are prioritized for the stable release. If you'd like to participate or learn more, check out our blog post about the program.

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 release new major versions of Electron with new versions of those components approximately quarterly. The tentative 7.0.0 schedule maps out key dates in the Electron 7 development life cycle. Also, see our versioning document for more detailed information about versioning in Electron.

For information on planned breaking changes in upcoming versions of Electron, see our Planned Breaking Changes doc.

🎉 Electron is moving to release a new major stable version every 12 weeks! 🎉

⚡️ Wow that's quick! But why?​

Simply put, Chromium doesn't stop shipping so Electron is not going to slow down either.

Chromium releases on a consistent 6-week schedule. To deliver the most up-to-date versions of Chromium in Electron, our schedule needs to track theirs. More information around Chromium's release cycle can be found here.

🚀 Why every 12 weeks?​

Every 6 weeks, a new Chromium release comes out with new features, bug fixes / security fixes, and V8 improvements. Electron's users have been loud and clear about wanting these changes in a timely manner, so we've adjusted our stable release dates to match every other Chromium stable release. Up first, Electron v6.0.0 will include M76 and is scheduled for stable release on July 30, 2019, the same release day as Chromium M76.

🚧 What does this mean for me and my Electron app?​

You'll have access to new Chromium and V8 features and fixes sooner than before. Importantly, you'll also know when those new changes are coming, so you'll be able to plan with better information than before.

The Electron team will continue to support the latest three major versions. For example, when v6.0.0 goes stable on July 30, 2019, we will support v6.x, v5.x, and v4.x, while v3.x will reach End-Of-Life.

💬 App Feedback Program​

Please consider joining our App Feedback Program to help us with testing our beta releases and stabilization. Projects who participate in this program test Electron betas on their apps; and in return, the new bugs they find are prioritized for the stable release.

📝 A brief history of Electron releases​

The decisions around stable releases before v3.0.0 did not follow a schedule. We added internal schedules to the project with v3.0.0 and v4.0.0. Earlier this year, we decided to publicize our stable release date for the first time for Electron v5.0.0. Announcing our stable release dates was positively received overall and we're excited to continue doing that for future releases.

In order to better streamline these upgrade-related efforts, our Upgrades and Releases Working Groups were created within our Governance system. They have allowed us to better prioritize and delegate this work, which we hope will become more apparent with each subsequent release.

Here is where our new cadence will put us in comparison to Chromium's cadence:

📨 If you have questions, please mail us at info@electronjs.org.