Electron 11 has been released with upgrades to Chromium 87, V8 8.7, and Node.js 12.18.3. The new release also adds support for Apple Silicon.
Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It combines Chromium and Node.js into a single runtime, and apps can be packaged for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Both Atom and Electron were open sourced in 2014. During the summer Electron officially graduated from the OpenJS Foundation's incubation program, and is now an OpenJS Foundation Impact Project.
The support for Apple Silicon means that from now on, Electron will ship in separate versions of Electron for Intel Macs and Apple Silicon Macs. Prior to this change, the developers were already shipping two artifacts, darwin-x64 and mas-x64, with the latter being for Mac App Store compatibility usage. This has now been increased with another two artifacts, darwin-arm64 and mas-arm64, which are the Apple Silicon equivalents. On November 10, Apple announced their new M1 chips, which will be included in their upcoming hardware. Until now, Macs have used multiple chips for the CPU, I/O, and security. With the move to M1, these technologies are combined into a single system on a chip, and Electron will now ship in separate versions to take account of this.
Elsewhere, the new release has added a V8 crash message and location information to the crashReport parameters. This is aimed at providing more effective debugging.
Electron 11 also improves the performance of sending wide objects over the context bridge. This has been achieved by not converting or cloning the object keys as by spec they are either strings, numbers or symbols, and are all primitives and therefore do not need to be converted or cloned. The developers say that for objects with lots of keys this is another quick win.
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