Here I was referring specifically to pulling in a web browser as a dependency. Chrome pumps out security releases regularly for all sorts of issues. If you're essentially making Chromium the core of your application, you inherit those security issues (setting aside the fact it may happen in code paths you don't use). And, consequently, you need to keep up on updating Electron and distributing new builds to your end users, even if you haven't made any code changes.

I'm not suggesting every Electron app is a giant bag of vulnerabilities, just that you have a lot more to keep on than you would writing with GTK or UIKit. And, since everything is bundled with the application, you can't rely on OS updates to fix things for you. You need to cut a new release and distribute it.

If you follow the Electron recommendations on security you'll be on the right path. You'll just find common tasks have become harder than they were back when Electron was attracting people with its ease-of-use. I found trying to do type-safe IPC to be an exercise in frustration. If you read the old docs, tutorials, or books, you'll find IPC used to be considerably more free-wheeling. Locking it down is the right trade-off, I think. But there's been an accumulation of many small changes like that. As a result, I don't think the framework is nearly as easy to work with as when Slack or VS Code adopted it.

Thank you for your response. I have previously dealt with IPC for a different project and it was painful indeed.

But I found out that there is this new Preload module in electron that lets you use Node.js very easily via normal export and import. I'm using a popular starter template and it works great so far.