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Electron 45

· 8 min read
Electron
Electron

Electron 45 has been released! It includes upgrades to Chromium 155.0.8038.2, V8 15.5, and Node v24.21.0.

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 45! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Notable Changes​

Screen sharing now asks for the display-capture permission​

Requests to capture the screen, a window, or a tab are now passed to session.setPermissionRequestHandler() as the documented display-capture permission instead of media. Previously they arrived as media with an empty mediaTypes array, indistinguishable from a camera or microphone request. Applications with a permission handler that grants media and denies everything else must also grant display-capture, or screen sharing will stop working. See the breaking changes document for details. #52824

System passkeys on macOS​

Electron 45 extends app.configureWebAuthn() with platform passkey support on macOS. Set platformPasskeys: true and navigator.credentials.create() and .get() present Apple's native passkey sheet, served by any credential provider such as iCloud Keychain or 1Password. When both Touch ID and platform passkeys are configured, the new select-webauthn-authenticator session event lets your app choose which one to use. #51563

Files inside ASAR archives are read directly from the archive​

fs.open(), fs.createReadStream(), fs.copyFile(), fs.cp(), and related APIs now read files inside ASAR archives straight out of the archive instead of extracting a temporary copy first. Cold reads of large packed files are up to 100x faster, and apps no longer leave temporary files behind. The descriptors these calls return are only meaningful to Node's fs module; see the breaking changes document for what is no longer supported. #52833 #53919

Network, auth, and download events identify the requesting frame​

webRequest and protocol handler requests now carry an initiatorOrigin, DownloadItem gains getInitiatorOrigin(), and the will-download and preconnect session events receive the requesting frame as a trailing argument. Together with a series of fixes that attribute permission checks to the frame that made them, this makes it easier to write permission and network policies that reason about individual frames rather than whole windows. #53700 #53679 #53690 #53692

Stack Changes​

Electron 45 upgrades Chromium from 152.0.7977.54 to 155.0.8038.2, Node.js from v24.18.1 to v24.21.0, and V8 from 15.2 to 15.5.

New Features and Improvements​

  • Added disableWakeLocks to webPreferences so that page activity such as audio playback no longer prevents the system from sleeping. #52342
  • Added initiatorOrigin to webRequest and protocol handler requests, DownloadItem.getInitiatorOrigin(), and a trailing frame argument to the will-download and preconnect session events. #53700
  • Added webFrame.getIsolatedWorlds() and the isolated-world-created event so preload scripts can discover isolated worlds as they are created. #50633
  • Added a Windows Error Reporting helper module so that crashReporter captures __fastfail and other crashes that bypass the in-process handler on Windows. #53851
  • Added platform passkey support to app.configureWebAuthn() on macOS, and a select-webauthn-authenticator session event for choosing between Touch ID and platform passkeys. #51563
  • Added the ELECTRON_DEBUG_DRAGGABLE_REGIONS environment variable, which visualizes and logs draggable regions in unpackaged apps to help debug custom title bars. #53626
  • Files inside ASAR archives are now read directly from the archive by fs.open(), fs.createReadStream(), fs.copyFile(), fs.cp(), and related APIs instead of through a temporary copy, and fs.opendir() and fs.readlink() now work on archives. #52833
  • Improved protocol.handle() performance by relaying untouched net.fetch() responses without passing them through JavaScript. #53379
  • Improved performance of fs operations on paths inside ASAR archives. #53919
  • Improved performance of Menu and MenuItem by implementing them natively. #53914
  • Improved performance of computing draggable regions in windows with many -webkit-app-region: drag elements. #53596 #53649
  • Improved startup time by loading WHATWG streams and the desktop-name helper only when they are used. #53899
  • Improved startup time of Node.js-enabled renderers by pushing preload paths to them instead of fetching them with a synchronous IPC. #53916
  • Renderer network requests no longer wait on the main process when a session's webRequest listeners only observe requests or are filtered to other resource types. #53204 (Also in 44)

Breaking Changes​

Behavior Changed: screen capture requests are reported as display-capture​

Requests to capture the screen, a window, or a tab, whether made through navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia() or through getUserMedia() with the chromeMediaSource constraints, are now passed to session.setPermissionRequestHandler() as display-capture. media is now used only for camera and microphone devices, and details.mediaTypes lists video and/or audio for both. A handler that allows only media must also allow display-capture to keep screen sharing working:

session.defaultSession.setPermissionRequestHandler(
  (webContents, permission, callback) => {
    callback(permission === 'media' || permission === 'display-capture');
  },
);

The display-capture Permissions-Policy now also applies to the getUserMedia() path, so a cross-origin <iframe> that captures the screen this way needs allow="display-capture". #52824

Behavior Changed: window.open() children of unsandboxed windows get their own sandboxed process​

A window.open() child whose sandbox state differs from its opener's renderer process is now created in its own process with no opener relationship: window.open() returns null in the opener and window.opener is null in the child, matching noopener behavior. Because child windows default to sandboxed, a child opened from an unsandboxed window is now isolated by default, and a warning is logged to the opener's console. To keep sharing the opener's process, return webPreferences: { sandbox: false } from webContents.setWindowOpenHandler(). #52472

Behavior Changed: file descriptors for files inside ASAR archives are only usable through fs​

fs.open(), fs.openSync(), and fs.promises.open() on a file inside an ASAR archive now return a descriptor that only identifies the entry to Node's fs module rather than a descriptor for an extracted temporary copy. Code that reads the raw descriptor, such as a native addon, child_process stdio, or net.Socket({ fd }), fails with EBADF and is not supported. Opening a packed file with a flag that allows writing now fails with EACCES, and fs.stat() on a symbolic link inside an archive now follows the link. #52833

Default Changed: document.requestStorageAccessFor is disabled​

Chromium has disabled document.requestStorageAccessFor by default ahead of its removal. The API can temporarily be restored with the enableBlinkFeatures web preference set to RequestStorageAccessFor. See Chromium's intent to remove discussion for more information.

Removed: contentTracing.enableHeapProfiling()​

The experimental contentTracing.enableHeapProfiling() API has been removed. Chromium removed the memlog implementation that backed it and replaced it with a Perfetto heap-profiling data source, which Electron does not yet integrate.

Deprecated: synchronous safeStorage methods​

The synchronous safeStorage.isEncryptionAvailable(), safeStorage.encryptString(), and safeStorage.decryptString() methods are deprecated and will be removed in Electron 46, following Chromium's removal of the synchronous OSCrypt backend they are built on. Use isAsyncEncryptionAvailable(), encryptStringAsync(), and decryptStringAsync() instead; data encrypted with the synchronous method can be decrypted with decryptStringAsync(). #53850

End of Support for 42.x.y​

Electron 42.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. See https://releases.electronjs.org/schedule to see the timeline for supported versions of Electron.

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.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

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