GitHub’s Electron development team has delivered version 5.0 of the framework for cross-platform applications as planned. In addition to bug fixes and some improvements to the APIs, new features and a few breaking changes in Electron 5.0 have been added.

To help users take advantage of the latest JavaScript features, performance enhancements, and fixed vulnerabilities, the latest release of the framework includes updates to the core components Chromium, V8, and Node.js. Chromium 73.0.3683.119 is now used in the frontend. The JavaScript Runtime V8 is in version 7.3.492.27 and in the backend Electron relies on Node.js 12.0.0.

Migration to Promises

As part of the promisification initiative, the development team is working to rebuild the existing callback- based capabilities so that they will issue promises in the future. Electron 5.0 has adapted more than ten APIs, including the Cookies API and webContents.loadURL.

More will follow in the next releases.

For macOS, systemPreferences provides three new or revised system color access functions: systemPreferences.getAccentColor,systemPreferences.getColor, and systemPreferences.getSystemColor.

The Breaking Changes include security-relevant changes. So the values of are nodeIntegration and webviewTag now defaults to false. Renderers that start with sandbox: true will automatically run in a sandbox in the future. Previously, developers had to activate the mixed sandbox mode.

Developers can either install the new version using the npm install electron @ latest command via Node Package Manager or download it from the project site to GitHub.