Electron was never supposed to be permanent. When GitHub shipped the framework in 2013, it was a pragmatic shortcut - build once in web tech, deploy everywhere. The assumption was that native apps would eventually reassert themselves, that performance-conscious developers would migrate back to platform-specific toolkits once the shortcuts stopped paying off. That migration never came.
Slack, VS Code, Figma (via browser), Discord, Notion, Spotify’s desktop client - the list of Electron or browser-based apps that have become load-bearing infrastructure in daily work is long enough to stop being a list and start being the default architecture. Most people reading this are running half their workflows inside a Chromium rendering engine without thinking about it.
What’s shifted in 2025 and into 2026 is that this is no longer just a developer convenience story. It’s a platform power story. Microsoft rebuilt Teams as a proper native app and got credit for it as if it were unusual. Apple promotes the performance benefits of native SwiftUI apps at WWDC every year, and then every major productivity tool on macOS is still an Electron wrapper. The incentive gradient runs entirely toward the web stack.
Chrome Is the Platform Now
The uncomfortable implication here is that Google has quietly won a platform war it never officially declared. Chrome’s market share - consistently above 60% across desktop browsers, according to StatCounter - means that when developers build for “the browser,” they are largely building for Blink, the rendering engine that powers Chrome. Web standards bodies exist to prevent any single engine from dictating behavior, but standards follow implementation, and Blink implementations ship first.
This matters because it inverts the competitive story Microsoft tried to tell with Windows 11. TPM requirements, hardware compatibility pressure, deep integration with the taskbar - all of it assumes the OS layer is where users and developers will care about differentiation. It increasingly isn’t.
The Part Nobody Wants to Admit
Native apps have real advantages. Memory efficiency, system integration, performance on constrained hardware - these aren’t myths. But they require platform-specific investment that most product teams won’t authorize when a React-based frontend already works and the engineers who wrote it are already on staff.
So the browser keeps expanding its territory not because it’s technically superior, but because the coordination cost of going native is too high. ChromeOS proved years ago that you could ship a computer where the browser was the OS, and people used it fine. The rest of the industry just got there slower, without making it official.