6 ms·

Track which Electron apps slow down macOS 26 Tahoe

149 points by mikamika83 1y ago

bigyabai 1y ago
Surely this will shame them into supporting MacOS better and not push developers towards making their desktop webapp a website.
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  The issue is already fixed upstream in electron, it was due to the overriding of an internal/undocumented system function behaving differently by the nature of just being overridden at all (the function body was empty).
- nozzlegear 1y ago
  Either solution is an improvement over the laggy electron app. Using Safari's web app feature on discord's website feels markedly better than trying to use their "native" app.
  - kalleboo 1y ago
    People keep saying they need Electron because keeping up with the system's native web view is impossible yet a bunch of these apps have web versions that work perfectly fine (or as you say, even better) in Safari
  - mitchell209 1y ago
    I just reformatted my MacBook and I was hesitant to reinstall the discord app because of how terrible it is. That sounds like a good compromise I never thought of considering discord is more of a windows PC thing for me. Thanks.
- cyberax 1y ago
  Or just dropping macOS support altogether...
nikolay 1y ago
There's a better way - you can find all apps you really should care about, i.e., the ones you have installed locally - run the last script in a comment of the Gist [0]. Update: It appears that the author of shamelectron was influenced by the same Gist [1]. [0]: https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1e58 https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1... [1]: https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1e58?permalink_comment_id=5786430#gistcomment-5786430 https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1...
- nikolay 1y ago
  Some notable apps without fixes (which I have installed locally): * 1Password.app * Bruno.app * Claude.app (oh noes!) * Cursor.app * Docker.app * Dropbox Dash.app * Dropbox.app * Element.app * GitKraken.app * Graphite.app * HEY.app (shame on DHH!) * Keeper Password Manager.app (it's not just 1Password) * Keybase.app * Kiro.app (come on, AWS!) * Ledger Live.app (crypto seems to lag behind Web 2.0 still!) * Loom.app * Notion Calendar.app * Notion Mail.app * Notion.app * Pocket Casts.app * Podman Desktop.app * Proton Mail.app * Proton Pass.app (all major password manager apps are in trouble) * Redis Insight.app * Sculptor.app * Simplenote.app (shame on photomatt!) * Texts.app (although it's possibly now replaced by Beeper) * Tonkeeper.app * Windsurf - Next.app * WorkFlowy.app * itch.app * krisp.app
  - rezonant 1y ago
    > * HEY.app (shame on DHH!) There are much better reasons to shame DHH.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jen20 1y ago
    The number of major companies doing half-assed javascript bullshit instead of proper native macOS apps is ridiculous. This did remind me to go cancel 1Password though, something I'd been meaning to do since they switched _to_ electron...
Fnoord 1y ago
How does the Electron alternative Tauri perform on macOS 26 Tahoe?
- mikamika83 1y ago
  No issues. There was a very specific bug in electron that's now fixed.. now we just wait until companies bump the electron versions
filchermcurr 1y ago
A couple not on the list: OpenMTP.app (Electron 18.3.15) DiffusionBee.app (Electron 13.6.9)
- mikamika83 1y ago
  Oof, those are some ancient electron versions.
  - filchermcurr 1y ago
    I see, sorry to waste your time. I thought the list was meant to be informational for people to assess which applications were problematic. I didn't realize it was more of a call to action.
    - mikamika83 1y ago
      not at all! thanks for the callouts, i'm sure people who have those installed will find the headsup helpful!
  - geoffpado 1y ago
    If you go back far enough, they just don't have the issue at all! Running your "detect using cornerMask" script from another comment in this post, I have an app (https://www.haikuanimator.com/ https://www.haikuanimator.com/) that shows up green… because it's using Electron 2.0.8!
    - mikamika83 1y ago
      Thats fair, I guess. But running an electron app that out of date is just playing with fire. You know, with the couple hundred chromium and electron CVE's and all :/
Spunkie 1y ago
In general the Tahoe update has been awful for all my end users that decided to update. It's not just electron apps that are the issue btw, just yesterday we ran into an issue with Zoom. It was breaking prompts/popups and by extension the system settings, the Mac app store, iTouch, and a ton of other random stuff was broken in silent and inconsistent ways. Also all my 8gb users are noticing significantly higher memory usage compared to their previous macOS versions.
- bartread 1y ago
  Thanks. It sounds like the issue has already been fixed in Electron, although it will obviously take a while for all app vendors to bump versions. I'm guessing Zoom might be hitting the same overridden system call that Electron was, although I have no firm information that this is the case. Regardless, I've just checked my settings to ensure this upgrade won't be installed automatically because I wasn't sure how MacOS behaves with major upgrades, and will probably wait 2 - 3 months before letting Tahoe onto my system to allow everyone else time to get their fixes and upgrades done.
- pants2 1y ago
  Why do you install the Zoom app? Seems like only a way to collect data on you vs the web version that works just great.
  - dewey 1y ago
    The question is why the app is bad, not why users install it.
  - eptcyka 1y ago
    Web version doesn’t handle large amounts of participants in a single call, way back when I used zoom.
    - workfromspace 1y ago
      I used the web version last month for an inside town hall meeting with ~1k participants and it was as smooth as it could be.
tomhow 1y ago
Related, three days ago: Detect Electron apps on Mac that hasn't been updated to fix the system wide lag - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45437112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45437112 - Oct 2025 (114 comments)
wilg 1y ago
This performance issue aside, which I haven’t noticed, a friend recently commented about the quality of Apple’s native apps that he would strongly prefer an Electron app for all of them because it’s a sign that they might actually work in an understandable way and not be totally broken all the time.
the_lucifer 1y ago
Seeing 1Password there hurts me. They used to be paragons of well designed native apps that they dumped with 8.
- lawgimenez 1y ago
  Truly sad, if I remember they were still migrating to SwiftUI for their iOS app. I have an app which almost shares the same SwiftUI codebase with iOS and macOS, and I am a one-man dev. If I can do it, I believe these million dollar company can also.
  - concinds 1y ago
    SwiftUI is still broken for any non-simple apps, almost a decade after its introduction. Completely unacceptable for big apps. Look at OmniFocus, who inexplicably became early-adopters of it, and it's had a bunch of UI glitches and inconsistent behavior requiring app restart (like you select one list item, but the inspector shows you details for another list item) ever since. Apple only has itself to blame for Electron's popularity.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - Razengan 1y ago
      > almost a decade after its introduction. It was released in 2019, so 6 years ago at most. > Apple only has itself to blame for Electron's popularity. + Microsoft with their inability to decide on a single UI framework/API for more than 1.5 years.
      - concinds 1y ago
        My bad, I recalled 2017 for some reason. And of course, same problem on Windows.
  - Razengan 1y ago
    > I have an app which almost shares the same SwiftUI codebase with iOS and macOS, and I am a one-man dev. How do you crusade through Apple's appalling [lack of] documentation and dumb error messages and all the weird ＊magic＊ involved in wrangling an imperative language into a declarative framework? 5 years after SwiftUI's release I still struggle to build a simple photo viewer or expense tracker. > Sadly, for many of these Electron apps, it would probably be better to install the iOS app, but most vendors disable that option. If companies enabled the flag to let users install their iOS apps on Mac, it would be a better world, but some asinine companies refuse to, and Apple has to respect the dev's decision, however dumb it may be. I love how Apple worked around that by making iPhone Mirroring, which is a win for users. I actually use that over the desktop website/Electron crap for some apps. But how long before companies force Apple to remove that feature, like they did with removing an easy way to "Disable Javascript" from Safari?
self_awareness 1y ago
The fact that an application can slow down the system doesn't sound like a problem with the application, but rather it's a problem with the OS. Tracking applications that "are not fixed" is not the solution. Fixing the OS is the solution.
- Etheryte 1y ago
  Otherwise I would be inclined to agree with you, but in this specific case I'm torn. These apps (ab)used a private API and the OS update meant they suddenly used it incorrectly. That's not something that's really the OS fault as far as I'm concerned. But I do agree that better separation is always good.
  - gfehhffvvv 1y ago
    Historically Windows was known for not causing this kind of breakage for even “(ab)users” of private APIs, common misusers, buggy users, etc. And even working around such issues on the OS side.
    - self_awareness 1y ago
      Yeah, Windows is actually known for bending the OS so that backward compatibility is preserved. They even added a GUI tab with Compatibility settings. But of course, Apple is not Microsoft, so they can do whatever they please. On Apple systems, non-working software on new macOS releases is a normal thing, maybe part of their philosophy.
      - sunaookami 1y ago
        >Windows is actually known for bending the OS so that backward compatibility is preserved Such as... having two context menus ;)
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  In this case Electron intentionally used reflection to override functionality that isn't part of the API surface, so maybe not as cut and dried as all that
yangchang007 1y ago
[dead]
pavlov 1y ago
The problem is that Electron has been using an API clearly marked private by Apple, and they were doing it for purely cosmetic reasons (tweaking window corner masks). Now macOS can’t render these windows efficiently because they’re using the private method, so the window system can’t apply its standard rendering model. Framework developers need to have a much higher standard for when to use a private API. But I also think Apple should do more testing with Electron and proactively contribute these fixes. Scanning the framework for private API usage is easily doable for them. If Apple had sent this fix in June when they released the first beta of the new OS, it would have made it into most of these apps.
- ilumanty 1y ago
  A trusted source once told me that Mac OS 10 system libraries contain a bunch of shims so that Adobe apps may continue to misuse them the way they did in Mac OS 9. Now that they have a tight grip over the app ecosystem, they don’t even bother to help a major OSS framework that powers thousands of apps make the transition.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  Apple constantly misuses "private" API to give their own applications feature they don’t want to see in other applications on the AppStore. At some point, the current situation is to be expected. It’s ok. Electron apps will be fixed and it will be all right.
usrxcghghj 1y ago
you mean even with all that telemetry of opening apps they couldnt test the most used apps and frameworks/electron for bugs?

149 points by mikamika83 1y ago

Surely this will shame them into supporting MacOS better and not push developers towards making their desktop webapp a website.

ranger_danger 1y ago
The issue is already fixed upstream in electron, it was due to the overriding of an internal/undocumented system function behaving differently by the nature of just being overridden at all (the function body was empty).
nozzlegear 1y ago
Either solution is an improvement over the laggy electron app. Using Safari's web app feature on discord's website feels markedly better than trying to use their "native" app.
- kalleboo 1y ago
  People keep saying they need Electron because keeping up with the system's native web view is impossible yet a bunch of these apps have web versions that work perfectly fine (or as you say, even better) in Safari
- mitchell209 1y ago
  I just reformatted my MacBook and I was hesitant to reinstall the discord app because of how terrible it is. That sounds like a good compromise I never thought of considering discord is more of a windows PC thing for me. Thanks.
cyberax 1y ago
Or just dropping macOS support altogether...

nikolay 1y ago

There's a better way - you can find all apps you really should care about, i.e., the ones you have installed locally - run the last script in a comment of the Gist [0]. Update: It appears that the author of shamelectron was influenced by the same Gist [1]. [0]: https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1e58 https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1... [1]: https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1e58?permalink_comment_id=5786430#gistcomment-5786430 https://gist.github.com/tkafka/e3eb63a5ec448e9be6701bfd1f1b1...

nikolay 1y ago
Some notable apps without fixes (which I have installed locally): * 1Password.app * Bruno.app * Claude.app (oh noes!) * Cursor.app * Docker.app * Dropbox Dash.app * Dropbox.app * Element.app * GitKraken.app * Graphite.app * HEY.app (shame on DHH!) * Keeper Password Manager.app (it's not just 1Password) * Keybase.app * Kiro.app (come on, AWS!) * Ledger Live.app (crypto seems to lag behind Web 2.0 still!) * Loom.app * Notion Calendar.app * Notion Mail.app * Notion.app * Pocket Casts.app * Podman Desktop.app * Proton Mail.app * Proton Pass.app (all major password manager apps are in trouble) * Redis Insight.app * Sculptor.app * Simplenote.app (shame on photomatt!) * Texts.app (although it's possibly now replaced by Beeper) * Tonkeeper.app * Windsurf - Next.app * WorkFlowy.app * itch.app * krisp.app
- rezonant 1y ago
  > * HEY.app (shame on DHH!) There are much better reasons to shame DHH.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jen20 1y ago
  The number of major companies doing half-assed javascript bullshit instead of proper native macOS apps is ridiculous. This did remind me to go cancel 1Password though, something I'd been meaning to do since they switched _to_ electron...

Fnoord 1y ago

How does the Electron alternative Tauri perform on macOS 26 Tahoe?

mikamika83 1y ago
No issues. There was a very specific bug in electron that's now fixed.. now we just wait until companies bump the electron versions

filchermcurr 1y ago

A couple not on the list: OpenMTP.app (Electron 18.3.15) DiffusionBee.app (Electron 13.6.9)

mikamika83 1y ago
Oof, those are some ancient electron versions.
- filchermcurr 1y ago
  I see, sorry to waste your time. I thought the list was meant to be informational for people to assess which applications were problematic. I didn't realize it was more of a call to action.
  - mikamika83 1y ago
    not at all! thanks for the callouts, i'm sure people who have those installed will find the headsup helpful!
- geoffpado 1y ago
  If you go back far enough, they just don't have the issue at all! Running your "detect using cornerMask" script from another comment in this post, I have an app (https://www.haikuanimator.com/ https://www.haikuanimator.com/) that shows up green… because it's using Electron 2.0.8!
  - mikamika83 1y ago
    Thats fair, I guess. But running an electron app that out of date is just playing with fire. You know, with the couple hundred chromium and electron CVE's and all :/

Spunkie 1y ago

In general the Tahoe update has been awful for all my end users that decided to update. It's not just electron apps that are the issue btw, just yesterday we ran into an issue with Zoom. It was breaking prompts/popups and by extension the system settings, the Mac app store, iTouch, and a ton of other random stuff was broken in silent and inconsistent ways. Also all my 8gb users are noticing significantly higher memory usage compared to their previous macOS versions.

bartread 1y ago
Thanks. It sounds like the issue has already been fixed in Electron, although it will obviously take a while for all app vendors to bump versions. I'm guessing Zoom might be hitting the same overridden system call that Electron was, although I have no firm information that this is the case. Regardless, I've just checked my settings to ensure this upgrade won't be installed automatically because I wasn't sure how MacOS behaves with major upgrades, and will probably wait 2 - 3 months before letting Tahoe onto my system to allow everyone else time to get their fixes and upgrades done.
pants2 1y ago
Why do you install the Zoom app? Seems like only a way to collect data on you vs the web version that works just great.
- dewey 1y ago
  The question is why the app is bad, not why users install it.
- eptcyka 1y ago
  Web version doesn’t handle large amounts of participants in a single call, way back when I used zoom.
  - workfromspace 1y ago
    I used the web version last month for an inside town hall meeting with ~1k participants and it was as smooth as it could be.

tomhow 1y ago

Related, three days ago: Detect Electron apps on Mac that hasn't been updated to fix the system wide lag - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45437112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45437112 - Oct 2025 (114 comments)

wilg 1y ago

This performance issue aside, which I haven’t noticed, a friend recently commented about the quality of Apple’s native apps that he would strongly prefer an Electron app for all of them because it’s a sign that they might actually work in an understandable way and not be totally broken all the time.

the_lucifer 1y ago

Seeing 1Password there hurts me. They used to be paragons of well designed native apps that they dumped with 8.

lawgimenez 1y ago
Truly sad, if I remember they were still migrating to SwiftUI for their iOS app. I have an app which almost shares the same SwiftUI codebase with iOS and macOS, and I am a one-man dev. If I can do it, I believe these million dollar company can also.
- concinds 1y ago
  SwiftUI is still broken for any non-simple apps, almost a decade after its introduction. Completely unacceptable for big apps. Look at OmniFocus, who inexplicably became early-adopters of it, and it's had a bunch of UI glitches and inconsistent behavior requiring app restart (like you select one list item, but the inspector shows you details for another list item) ever since. Apple only has itself to blame for Electron's popularity.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Razengan 1y ago
    > almost a decade after its introduction. It was released in 2019, so 6 years ago at most. > Apple only has itself to blame for Electron's popularity. + Microsoft with their inability to decide on a single UI framework/API for more than 1.5 years.
    - concinds 1y ago
      My bad, I recalled 2017 for some reason. And of course, same problem on Windows.
- Razengan 1y ago
  > I have an app which almost shares the same SwiftUI codebase with iOS and macOS, and I am a one-man dev. How do you crusade through Apple's appalling [lack of] documentation and dumb error messages and all the weird ＊magic＊ involved in wrangling an imperative language into a declarative framework? 5 years after SwiftUI's release I still struggle to build a simple photo viewer or expense tracker. > Sadly, for many of these Electron apps, it would probably be better to install the iOS app, but most vendors disable that option. If companies enabled the flag to let users install their iOS apps on Mac, it would be a better world, but some asinine companies refuse to, and Apple has to respect the dev's decision, however dumb it may be. I love how Apple worked around that by making iPhone Mirroring, which is a win for users. I actually use that over the desktop website/Electron crap for some apps. But how long before companies force Apple to remove that feature, like they did with removing an easy way to "Disable Javascript" from Safari?

self_awareness 1y ago

The fact that an application can slow down the system doesn't sound like a problem with the application, but rather it's a problem with the OS. Tracking applications that "are not fixed" is not the solution. Fixing the OS is the solution.

Etheryte 1y ago
Otherwise I would be inclined to agree with you, but in this specific case I'm torn. These apps (ab)used a private API and the OS update meant they suddenly used it incorrectly. That's not something that's really the OS fault as far as I'm concerned. But I do agree that better separation is always good.
- gfehhffvvv 1y ago
  Historically Windows was known for not causing this kind of breakage for even “(ab)users” of private APIs, common misusers, buggy users, etc. And even working around such issues on the OS side.
  - self_awareness 1y ago
    Yeah, Windows is actually known for bending the OS so that backward compatibility is preserved. They even added a GUI tab with Compatibility settings. But of course, Apple is not Microsoft, so they can do whatever they please. On Apple systems, non-working software on new macOS releases is a normal thing, maybe part of their philosophy.
    - sunaookami 1y ago
      >Windows is actually known for bending the OS so that backward compatibility is preserved Such as... having two context menus ;)
swiftcoder 1y ago
In this case Electron intentionally used reflection to override functionality that isn't part of the API surface, so maybe not as cut and dried as all that

yangchang007 1y ago

[dead]

pavlov 1y ago

The problem is that Electron has been using an API clearly marked private by Apple, and they were doing it for purely cosmetic reasons (tweaking window corner masks). Now macOS can’t render these windows efficiently because they’re using the private method, so the window system can’t apply its standard rendering model. Framework developers need to have a much higher standard for when to use a private API. But I also think Apple should do more testing with Electron and proactively contribute these fixes. Scanning the framework for private API usage is easily doable for them. If Apple had sent this fix in June when they released the first beta of the new OS, it would have made it into most of these apps.

ilumanty 1y ago
A trusted source once told me that Mac OS 10 system libraries contain a bunch of shims so that Adobe apps may continue to misuse them the way they did in Mac OS 9. Now that they have a tight grip over the app ecosystem, they don’t even bother to help a major OSS framework that powers thousands of apps make the transition.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
Apple constantly misuses "private" API to give their own applications feature they don’t want to see in other applications on the AppStore. At some point, the current situation is to be expected. It’s ok. Electron apps will be fixed and it will be all right.

usrxcghghj 1y ago

you mean even with all that telemetry of opening apps they couldnt test the most used apps and frameworks/electron for bugs?