7 ms·

Detect Electron apps on Mac that hasn't been updated to fix the system wide lag

165 points by tomaskafka 1y ago

echelon_musk 1y ago
That haven't been updated. Sigh
- TheJoeMan 1y ago
  Source title is "Detect Electron apps on mac where the Electron hasn't yet been updated to fix the system wide lag" which is also quite wordy.
iqandjoke 1y ago
Msty.app LM Studio.app ComfyUI.app Signal Beta.app Poe.app Visual Studio Code.app Trae.app Obsidian.app Kiro.app
pier25 1y ago
Wait... Resolve uses Electron? It's not for the main GUI, is it?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 1y ago
  what else would it be for? it makes sense they'd look for a way to use something that could use the same code on all platforms. never thought it would be electron though. it does look too polished to be a qt type of build though
  - Mashimo 1y ago
    > what else would it be for? Could be for a small part of the UI, for example the start page / project selection thing.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      that over the top annoying screen that gets dismissed as quickly as possible requires the weight of running electron on top of the heft of the actual program? ::face-palm:: if the entire UI was using electron, that would be one thing. but if as you suggest it is just a bolt on for a splash screen, ¡ay caramba!
      - Mashimo 1y ago
        I don't know what they use it for. Just an example what it could be.
- Austizzle 1y ago
  When I do scripting for resolve the UI API feels a lot like QT. Unless they made a very QT-like wrapper around JavaScript code. I wonder if instead there's small parts that are done in electron but most of it is qt
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  My guess would be that they wrapped the help/docs website into an Electron view.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    Doesn't QT have a webview component though? Why bring in the full weight of Electron?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- __jonas 1y ago
  No, the main GUI is QT, it's for a user plugin system called 'Workflow Integration Plugins'. The docs about this are not on the web so I can't link to it, but you can access them in the App's help menu. Quote from those docs: > Users can write their own Workflow Integration Plugin (an Electron app), using Resolve Javascript’s API, and Python or Lua scripts. For more information on how to create a Workflow Integration Plugin go to Help > Documentation > Developer, and open up the Workflow Integrations folder for technical details and sample code.
stereo 1y ago
It's surprising and disappointing that Apple didn't catch a bug like this in QA. This affects popular apps, and many people will have at least one of these apps with outdated Electron frameworks.
- lapcat 1y ago
  It's not surprising. It's sadly predictable that forced annual scheduled OS updates that must ship ready or not will ship when they're not ready. Apple abandoned any commitment to QA as soon as they committed to mid-September becoming a magical date, practically written in stone.
  - AlexandrB 1y ago
    What does Apple even get out of it? I don't think anyone is clamouring for new MacOS releases, so I can't imagine it drives hardware sales. MacOS is no longer a paid product either.
    - nottorp 1y ago
      They even have to provide separate updates for people that refuse to jump on the latest and greatest - NOW WITH LOW CONTRAST - version. Too bad their competition is worse. It's not like they're good any more. Btw I just checked and the assholes preselect the update to Tahoe, not the update to 15.7.1.
    - toast0 1y ago
      The regular update cadence and the lack of stability for developers sets an expectation that developers must be active (forever) or their product will stop working. That way, they never have to deal with fallout from breaking a 20 year old program like Microsoft got for breaking whatever version of GTA. There's no way a 20 year old program still runs on current macos, so nothing to worry about.
      - badc0ffee 1y ago
        I worked on some Mac security software. WWDC and that first macOS beta in June dictated whether we were going to spend the summer on features, or on compatibility with the new platform. There were a few crazy years, like file protection in Mojave, system extensions in Catalina, and Apple Silicon and other changes in Big Sur. Not to mention yearly device management changes and UI changes like dark mode, completely reworking the menu bar icon, etc. The Windows team never faced anything like this. Not only did Windows change slowly and with backward compatibility, but the users didn't upgrade right away, even if they were buying brand new laptops. But in the Mac world, a laptop bought in September/October is going to have the new macOS on it no matter what.
jermaustin1 1y ago
Running this made me realize that Ollama GUI is about 15 versions out of date. I'm not sure how often you are supposed to update your Electron package, but seems like it should be more often than that.
- Ambroos 1y ago
  The Ollama Mac app has essentially not changed since early 2024: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/commits/main/macapp https://github.com/ollama/ollama/commits/main/macapp
  - vaillancourtmax 1y ago
    You probably mean "2024" here, right?
  - nguyenkien 1y ago
    The new GUI app is closed source.
- tomaskafka 1y ago
  Electron team backported the fix to 2 previous versions, so that’s some datapoint about what they think people should be using.
  - sleepybrett 1y ago
    Thats fine, but i have plenty of electron apps on absolutely ancient versions of the library that I don't expect will be fixed anytime soon. This is why you don't use private apis.
- brightbeige 1y ago
  I have Version 0.12.3 which seems to be the most recent release: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/releases/tag/v0.12.3 https://github.com/ollama/ollama/releases/tag/v0.12.3 It doesn't show up with a laggy Electron version. I didn't use homebrew, but that version is also up-to-date: https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/ollama-app https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/ollama-app
Ambroos 1y ago
Has anyone been able to confirm if the macOS 26.1 developer beta is affected? I updated to it pretty quickly and haven't been able to reproduce the lag on it.
- mikamika83 1y ago
  Issue exists on 26.1 db
jpfromlondon 1y ago
[flagged]
- jermaustin1 1y ago
  Delete the lines that are checking for specific version, and just report all of them, and you can :D
- cultofmetatron 1y ago
  vscode spotify slack discord figma microsoft teams postman signal whatsapp chrome? good luck!
  - bilal4hmed 1y ago
    vscode signal mullvad balenaetcher Im surprised whatsapp showed up for you, its not for me. I had thought whatsapp was a native app
    - freehorse 1y ago
      Yes, they basically got the ios native version to also run for macs [0]. The perks of apple silicon I guess. It is a bit ironic how going to ARM architecture initially was initially thought of a burden for developpers having to maintain both x86 and ARM versions, while as it turns out, for those who target both ios and macos it makes it easier. I am not sure if the old electron-based whatsapp is still available, maybe the one from the website, vs the one from app store, is still electron? [0] https://9to5mac.com/2024/09/04/whatsapp-discontinue-electron-app-macos/ https://9to5mac.com/2024/09/04/whatsapp-discontinue-electron...
      - bilal4hmed 1y ago
        I downloaded it from here https://www.whatsapp.com/download/ https://www.whatsapp.com/download/ and it was a dmg
  - whatevaa 1y ago
brightbeige 1y ago
before updating docker desktop: X Docker.app: Electron 34.5.4 (Contents/MacOS/Docker Desktop.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Versions/A/Electron Framework) after updating docker desktop: X Docker.app: Electron 37.2.6 (Contents/MacOS/Docker Desktop.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Versions/A/Electron Framework)
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I always refuse to use their official desktop app, I'm not making an account / scrambling to remember my username / password, for the one time in a blue moon I need docker to evaluate a piece of software.
  - Svoka 1y ago
    Nobody forces you to log in when using docker desktop. Perfectly usable without an account, unless you want to push images to their registry.
    - giancarlostoro 1y ago
      That must have changed recently, it always asks me to login and I dont keep any images on their registry, that or they present it as a dark pattern where the option to NOT login is non-obvious. Even so, I'll stick to just not using Docker, I never have any use cases for it outside of as I said, evaluating software that requires it for whatever awful reason.
      - ffsm8 1y ago
        There is a skip login button. It's definitely less highlighted then the login form, but it is visible right on that dialog.
Gimpei 1y ago
So happy I haven’t updated yet. I always wait a few months for things like this to get fixed.
captn3m0 1y ago
For a static analysis approach, I wrote a NPM package called which-electron: https://github.com/captn3m0/which-electron https://github.com/captn3m0/which-electron It uses an automatically update package listing the hashes of all files in electron releases: https://github.com/captn3m0/electron-fingerprints https://github.com/captn3m0/electron-fingerprints I’ve been meaning to improve the detector to use ELF info.
- tomaskafka 1y ago
  Thank you, but I'd like to keep it simple, and we only need to detect electron apps and extract version from last 4 versions.
  - captn3m0 1y ago
    It’s great to have multiple approaches and more highlight on this problem.
chatmasta 1y ago
Monitoring Chromium CVE patches is a good way to find N-days in Electron apps based on unpatched versions of Chromium.
- tomaskafka 1y ago
  I was quite a bit surprised how old versions are used even in software like Cursor that's updated almost daily.
reaperducer 1y ago
Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer Big shock.
elashri 1y ago
The only Electron app that is showing the green light is Siyuan which they updated today. Everything else if affected. But most important I deleted some apps I don't know why I was keeping.
butz 1y ago
In all those years Electron still did not manage to separate runtime from applications, so updates would be smaller and security fixes would reach all applications much faster.
- tomaskafka 1y ago
  Isn't this the idea with PWAs (where runtime = browser)? I struggle to find Electron apps that couldn't be run as pinned web apps.
  - soapdog 1y ago
    the tricky bit is filesystem access.
extr 1y ago
Is there any kind of list somewhere of similar MacOS tweaks you can do to increase performance? When I'm using my Mac for work I don't care about anything except pure perf. Can we turn off animations? Fancy rendering? Background indexing? Other stuff?
- tomaskafka 1y ago
  I can’t live without Dock appearing without delay: Show dock instantly: defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0.0001; killall Dock Undo: defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay; killall Dock
  - Klonoar 1y ago
    The real hack is to learn to never use the dock, minimize it as small as possible and depending on your macOS version set an ultra long delay for it to show on hover. It’s a waste of space; everything you need from it can be accomplished with your keyboard.
    - eviks 1y ago
      What's your keyboard way of relaunching a recent so that's part of a dock section?
kemayo 1y ago
Obsidian put out a release fixing this today (1.9.14), but I think you have to do a full download-a-new-installer rather than just letting their auto-update do it.
soapdog 1y ago
the amount of people here that think that it is Apple fault is a bug happens cause an unrelated projected used a private API that is not supposed to be used cause implementation and behaviours will change over releases is way too high. Apple has always changed the behaviour of private APIs. That is why they are private. This has always happened in the lifecycle of MacOS X. This is not unexpected at all.

165 points by tomaskafka 1y ago

echelon_musk 1y ago

That haven't been updated. Sigh

TheJoeMan 1y ago
Source title is "Detect Electron apps on mac where the Electron hasn't yet been updated to fix the system wide lag" which is also quite wordy.

iqandjoke 1y ago

Msty.app LM Studio.app ComfyUI.app Signal Beta.app Poe.app Visual Studio Code.app Trae.app Obsidian.app Kiro.app

pier25 1y ago

Wait... Resolve uses Electron? It's not for the main GUI, is it?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 1y ago
what else would it be for? it makes sense they'd look for a way to use something that could use the same code on all platforms. never thought it would be electron though. it does look too polished to be a qt type of build though
- Mashimo 1y ago
  > what else would it be for? Could be for a small part of the UI, for example the start page / project selection thing.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    that over the top annoying screen that gets dismissed as quickly as possible requires the weight of running electron on top of the heft of the actual program? ::face-palm:: if the entire UI was using electron, that would be one thing. but if as you suggest it is just a bolt on for a splash screen, ¡ay caramba!
    - Mashimo 1y ago
      I don't know what they use it for. Just an example what it could be.
Austizzle 1y ago
When I do scripting for resolve the UI API feels a lot like QT. Unless they made a very QT-like wrapper around JavaScript code. I wonder if instead there's small parts that are done in electron but most of it is qt
fxtentacle 1y ago
My guess would be that they wrapped the help/docs website into an Electron view.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  Doesn't QT have a webview component though? Why bring in the full weight of Electron?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
__jonas 1y ago
No, the main GUI is QT, it's for a user plugin system called 'Workflow Integration Plugins'. The docs about this are not on the web so I can't link to it, but you can access them in the App's help menu. Quote from those docs: > Users can write their own Workflow Integration Plugin (an Electron app), using Resolve Javascript’s API, and Python or Lua scripts. For more information on how to create a Workflow Integration Plugin go to Help > Documentation > Developer, and open up the Workflow Integrations folder for technical details and sample code.

stereo 1y ago

It's surprising and disappointing that Apple didn't catch a bug like this in QA. This affects popular apps, and many people will have at least one of these apps with outdated Electron frameworks.

lapcat 1y ago
It's not surprising. It's sadly predictable that forced annual scheduled OS updates that must ship ready or not will ship when they're not ready. Apple abandoned any commitment to QA as soon as they committed to mid-September becoming a magical date, practically written in stone.
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  What does Apple even get out of it? I don't think anyone is clamouring for new MacOS releases, so I can't imagine it drives hardware sales. MacOS is no longer a paid product either.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    They even have to provide separate updates for people that refuse to jump on the latest and greatest - NOW WITH LOW CONTRAST - version. Too bad their competition is worse. It's not like they're good any more. Btw I just checked and the assholes preselect the update to Tahoe, not the update to 15.7.1.
  - toast0 1y ago
    The regular update cadence and the lack of stability for developers sets an expectation that developers must be active (forever) or their product will stop working. That way, they never have to deal with fallout from breaking a 20 year old program like Microsoft got for breaking whatever version of GTA. There's no way a 20 year old program still runs on current macos, so nothing to worry about.
    - badc0ffee 1y ago
      I worked on some Mac security software. WWDC and that first macOS beta in June dictated whether we were going to spend the summer on features, or on compatibility with the new platform. There were a few crazy years, like file protection in Mojave, system extensions in Catalina, and Apple Silicon and other changes in Big Sur. Not to mention yearly device management changes and UI changes like dark mode, completely reworking the menu bar icon, etc. The Windows team never faced anything like this. Not only did Windows change slowly and with backward compatibility, but the users didn't upgrade right away, even if they were buying brand new laptops. But in the Mac world, a laptop bought in September/October is going to have the new macOS on it no matter what.

jermaustin1 1y ago

Running this made me realize that Ollama GUI is about 15 versions out of date. I'm not sure how often you are supposed to update your Electron package, but seems like it should be more often than that.

Ambroos 1y ago
The Ollama Mac app has essentially not changed since early 2024: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/commits/main/macapp https://github.com/ollama/ollama/commits/main/macapp
- vaillancourtmax 1y ago
  You probably mean "2024" here, right?
- nguyenkien 1y ago
  The new GUI app is closed source.
tomaskafka 1y ago
Electron team backported the fix to 2 previous versions, so that’s some datapoint about what they think people should be using.
- sleepybrett 1y ago
  Thats fine, but i have plenty of electron apps on absolutely ancient versions of the library that I don't expect will be fixed anytime soon. This is why you don't use private apis.
brightbeige 1y ago
I have Version 0.12.3 which seems to be the most recent release: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/releases/tag/v0.12.3 https://github.com/ollama/ollama/releases/tag/v0.12.3 It doesn't show up with a laggy Electron version. I didn't use homebrew, but that version is also up-to-date: https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/ollama-app https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/ollama-app

Ambroos 1y ago

Has anyone been able to confirm if the macOS 26.1 developer beta is affected? I updated to it pretty quickly and haven't been able to reproduce the lag on it.

mikamika83 1y ago
Issue exists on 26.1 db

jpfromlondon 1y ago

[flagged]

jermaustin1 1y ago
Delete the lines that are checking for specific version, and just report all of them, and you can :D
cultofmetatron 1y ago
vscode spotify slack discord figma microsoft teams postman signal whatsapp chrome? good luck!
- bilal4hmed 1y ago
  vscode signal mullvad balenaetcher Im surprised whatsapp showed up for you, its not for me. I had thought whatsapp was a native app
  - freehorse 1y ago
    Yes, they basically got the ios native version to also run for macs [0]. The perks of apple silicon I guess. It is a bit ironic how going to ARM architecture initially was initially thought of a burden for developpers having to maintain both x86 and ARM versions, while as it turns out, for those who target both ios and macos it makes it easier. I am not sure if the old electron-based whatsapp is still available, maybe the one from the website, vs the one from app store, is still electron? [0] https://9to5mac.com/2024/09/04/whatsapp-discontinue-electron-app-macos/ https://9to5mac.com/2024/09/04/whatsapp-discontinue-electron...
    - bilal4hmed 1y ago
      I downloaded it from here https://www.whatsapp.com/download/ https://www.whatsapp.com/download/ and it was a dmg
- whatevaa 1y ago

brightbeige 1y ago

before updating docker desktop: X Docker.app: Electron 34.5.4 (Contents/MacOS/Docker Desktop.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Versions/A/Electron Framework) after updating docker desktop: X Docker.app: Electron 37.2.6 (Contents/MacOS/Docker Desktop.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Versions/A/Electron Framework)

giancarlostoro 1y ago
I always refuse to use their official desktop app, I'm not making an account / scrambling to remember my username / password, for the one time in a blue moon I need docker to evaluate a piece of software.
- Svoka 1y ago
  Nobody forces you to log in when using docker desktop. Perfectly usable without an account, unless you want to push images to their registry.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    That must have changed recently, it always asks me to login and I dont keep any images on their registry, that or they present it as a dark pattern where the option to NOT login is non-obvious. Even so, I'll stick to just not using Docker, I never have any use cases for it outside of as I said, evaluating software that requires it for whatever awful reason.
    - ffsm8 1y ago
      There is a skip login button. It's definitely less highlighted then the login form, but it is visible right on that dialog.

Gimpei 1y ago

So happy I haven’t updated yet. I always wait a few months for things like this to get fixed.

captn3m0 1y ago

For a static analysis approach, I wrote a NPM package called which-electron: https://github.com/captn3m0/which-electron https://github.com/captn3m0/which-electron It uses an automatically update package listing the hashes of all files in electron releases: https://github.com/captn3m0/electron-fingerprints https://github.com/captn3m0/electron-fingerprints I’ve been meaning to improve the detector to use ELF info.

tomaskafka 1y ago
Thank you, but I'd like to keep it simple, and we only need to detect electron apps and extract version from last 4 versions.
- captn3m0 1y ago
  It’s great to have multiple approaches and more highlight on this problem.

chatmasta 1y ago

Monitoring Chromium CVE patches is a good way to find N-days in Electron apps based on unpatched versions of Chromium.

tomaskafka 1y ago
I was quite a bit surprised how old versions are used even in software like Cursor that's updated almost daily.

reaperducer 1y ago

Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer Big shock.

elashri 1y ago

The only Electron app that is showing the green light is Siyuan which they updated today. Everything else if affected. But most important I deleted some apps I don't know why I was keeping.

butz 1y ago

In all those years Electron still did not manage to separate runtime from applications, so updates would be smaller and security fixes would reach all applications much faster.

tomaskafka 1y ago
Isn't this the idea with PWAs (where runtime = browser)? I struggle to find Electron apps that couldn't be run as pinned web apps.
- soapdog 1y ago
  the tricky bit is filesystem access.

extr 1y ago

Is there any kind of list somewhere of similar MacOS tweaks you can do to increase performance? When I'm using my Mac for work I don't care about anything except pure perf. Can we turn off animations? Fancy rendering? Background indexing? Other stuff?

tomaskafka 1y ago
I can’t live without Dock appearing without delay: Show dock instantly: defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0.0001; killall Dock Undo: defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay; killall Dock
- Klonoar 1y ago
  The real hack is to learn to never use the dock, minimize it as small as possible and depending on your macOS version set an ultra long delay for it to show on hover. It’s a waste of space; everything you need from it can be accomplished with your keyboard.
  - eviks 1y ago
    What's your keyboard way of relaunching a recent so that's part of a dock section?

kemayo 1y ago

Obsidian put out a release fixing this today (1.9.14), but I think you have to do a full download-a-new-installer rather than just letting their auto-update do it.

soapdog 1y ago

the amount of people here that think that it is Apple fault is a bug happens cause an unrelated projected used a private API that is not supposed to be used cause implementation and behaviours will change over releases is way too high. Apple has always changed the behaviour of private APIs. That is why they are private. This has always happened in the lifecycle of MacOS X. This is not unexpected at all.