Electron 8 Released

February 4, the development team of Electron, Github’s application building framework, announced the latest major release of Electron 8.0.0.  The base technologies, like Chromium, are upgraded, and there are a lot of new features.

Electron is a framework that allows building applications that support cross-platforms, using JavaScript, HTML, or CSS.  As it is implemented with Web browser Chromium and JavaScript runtime environment Node.js, it can be used for developing applications that run on MacOS, Windows, and Linux.  It was originally developed as a framework for GitHub’s Atom editors.  It includes features like automatic updates, native menus and notifications, crash reporting, debugging and profiling.

Electron 8.0 is the latest version following Electron 7.0, released in October 2019.   Chromium has been upgraded to v80.0.3987.86, and Node.js to v12.13.0.  JavaScript engine V8 has also been upgraded to 8.0.  IPC (Inter Process Communication) uses V8’s Structured Clone algorithm.  It doubles the performance.  These are changes that effect the backward compatibility.

Electron 8 not includes session.downloadURL() API, which triggers download without BrowserWindow, and “―enable-api-filtering-logging” command switch, which allows logging with caller stack for some APIs like desktopCapturer.getSources().

Notification() is added with a new property that allows users to set notification timeout for Linux and Windows notifications.  There is also a new property that lets users customize Linux-base notifications.

There are many other feature improvements and fixes.

Electron https://www.electronjs.org/