Electron 28 Brings ECMAScript Modules Support

Electron 28 lands

Electron 28.0.0 was released on December 6, 2023, upgrading Chromium to 120.0.6099.56, V8 to 12.0 and Node.js to 18.18.2. It was the first Electron major to bring a long-requested JavaScript capability to the framework.

ECMAScript modules

The headline was support for ECMAScript modules, or ESM. Electron 28 enabled ESM in Electron proper, including areas such as the UtilityProcess API entrypoints. Electron Forge added matching support for using ESM to package, build and develop Electron applications, available in Forge v7.0.0 or higher.

Breaking changes

Electron 28 removed the deprecated BrowserWindow.setTrafficLightPosition and getTrafficLightPosition methods in favor of the window button position APIs, and removed ipcRenderer.sendTo, recommending a MessageChannel between renderers instead. The app.runningUnderRosettaTranslation property was removed in favor of runningUnderARM64Translation. Setting WebContents.backgroundThrottling to false now disables frame throttling for all WebContents in the host BrowserWindow.

Platform additions

The release added several properties to the display object, including detected, maximumCursorSize and nativeOrigin, and added support for the ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT environment variable on Linux. Electron 25 reached end-of-support with this release under the project's support policy.

Related on Skillo

See also: Electron 25 and net.fetch, Electron 31 and the File System API.

Sources

• Electron 28.0.0 (blog.electronjs.org)

Published date reflects the original event date (2023-12-06). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.