The JavaScript Colonization of the Desktop, by Electron
Description
A popular meme format, 'Wait, it's all Ohio? / Always has been', is adapted to a tech context. The scene is set in space, with one astronaut looking towards a cluster of well-known desktop application icons: Visual Studio Code, Skype, Discord, GitHub Desktop, and WhatsApp. This astronaut expresses surprise, saying, 'Wait it's all JavaScript?'. Another astronaut, seen from behind, is holding a gun to the first one's back. This second astronaut's helmet is covered by the logo for Electron.js, and they deliver the punchline: 'Always has been'. The meme humorously critiques the prevalence of the Electron framework, which allows developers to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It captures the moment of realization for many developers that a significant portion of their daily software toolkit is, under the hood, a bundled web browser, a fact that is a common source of jokes about performance and memory usage
Comments
7Comment deleted
Electron is the universe's ultimate punchline: to escape the browser, we put a browser in a native shell, just so we could write more JavaScript. It's the Circle of RAM
Spent a year shaving 2 ms off p99 on the backend, then shipped a 400 MB Electron “desktop” app that spawns its own Chrome cluster - nothing says efficient architecture like moving the cloud into the user’s RAM
That moment when you realize your 16GB of RAM isn't for running complex algorithms or compiling massive codebases - it's for running five different instances of Chromium pretending to be native apps, each with their own V8 engine and node_modules folder consuming 500MB just to display a chat window
The real plot twist isn't that everything is JavaScript - it's that we're all running Chromium instances disguised as native apps while complaining about RAM usage. At least when we inevitably rewrite everything in Rust, we'll still need a JavaScript layer for the UI. The astronaut with the gun? That's the V8 engine, and it's been holding us hostage since 2008
We replaced three native stacks with one JS repo and an embedded Chromium - now CAP stands for CPU, Amp‑hours, and Patience
Electron is Docker for UIs: ship a full Chromium per app, call it “native,” and outsource performance to the user’s RAM - turns out it was JavaScript all the way down
JS ubiquity: the architectural pattern where one event loop rules client, server, and your on-call rotation