Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311

144•STRML•1h ago

Comments

kccqzy•1h ago

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311#issuecomme...

If this comment is to be believed, it's not Apple's fault. It's the apps mucking around with the internals of AppKit.

This example just happens to illustrate two of my least favorite software engineering practices: (1) despite one piece of code making a method private, another piece of code still overrides it/modifies it/calls it, an affront to the idea of encapsulation; (2) a piece of code has different behavior depending on the identity of a function, contrary to the principle of extensionality.

wk_end•1h ago

"Not Apple's fault" is up for debate; even if Electron shouldn't be doing this, Apple arguably shouldn't be pushing out updates that cause issues with wide-swaths of software that users use regardless.

tom1337•59m ago

So you're blaming because they've changed a private API which electron not only used, but also seemed to have patched?

asqueella•31m ago

No, for "pushing out updates that cause issues [with very common software]".

pavlov•59m ago

That’s the principle that prevented Windows from making any meaningful progress for the past three decades.

wk_end•52m ago

What? Windows made tons of progress while maintaining this principle and became the most popular operating system in the world. Are you trying to tell me that you believe the evolution of Windows from 1.0 all the way to 7 - the entire time trying to operate according to this principle - doesn't constitute meaningful progress?

The recent stagnation of the OS has nothing to do with attempting to maintain backwards compatibility.

acdha•42m ago

It’s true that they’ve made some progress but my work laptop running Windows 11 still has UI elements from Windows 95/NT 4. The file system hasn’t improved since then and the keyboard responsiveness is actually worse. BeOS on 90s hardware absolutely torches Windows 11 on things like UI responsiveness, ability to multitask without degrading UI performance, and the file system (not networking, of course, it wasn’t perfect).

I think it’s fair to question whether the decisions around backwards compatibility have been worth the cost but I’d imagine they’re already doing that. Enterprise IT departments love Windows but nobody else does, and the generation of people who grew up using iOS/Android and macOS/ChromeOS for school aren’t going to jump at the chance to bring that enterprise IT experience into their personal lives.

cyberax•24m ago

You can actually tell the old controls from the Win NT by how fast and responsive they are. They also properly follow the best practices by showing keyboard accelerators when you press "alt".

It's the new stuff that is slow and unusable.

wk_end•22m ago

> The file system hasn’t improved since then

The file system is a great example of how Windows has evolved, actually. Windows 95 was (initially) still using FAT16! NT4 was using NTFS 1.2, we're now on NTFS 3.1. To the file system itself MS added (per Wikipedia): disk quotas, file-level encryption, sparse files, "reparse points" (dunno), journaling, "distributed link tracking" (also dunno), "the $Extend folder and its files" (ditto), and better MFT recovery. Also, apparently not part of the file system itself: symbolic links, transactions, partition shrinking, and self-healing. And that's just what I gleaned from the History section on Wikipedia's NTFS article; I'm sure there's more.

Apple specifically was much slower catching its file system up with Microsoft, despite their disinterest in backwards compatibility. And if Apple jumped ahead a little with APFS, well, NTFS holds its own just fine against APFS for 99% of users. And for when it doesn't, there's also ReFS, an entirely new next gen file system used on Windows Server, and is now slowly making its way onto the desktop.

sgjohnson•26m ago

You can still find applications written for Windows 3.1 in the latest builds of Windows 11. Something regarding database drivers if I recall correctly.

Now imagine if you could get rid of all that legacy crap to make it work in the first place. Microsoft CAN’T do that, because the entire premise of Windows is backwards compatability.

Apple? They don’t care. Killing 32bit apps? Just make an announcement saying that in 2 major macOS releases, macOS won’t be able to run 32 bit apps. It cuts down bloat, and it cuts down on the potential attack surfaces for malicious actors.

Obviously just about everyone would agree that Windows 1 -> 7 was progress. I don’t think you’ll find too many people who’ll say the same about Windows 7 -> 11.

wk_end•21m ago

> Now imagine if you could get rid of all that legacy crap to make it work in the first place.

What would be the consequence of this? What harm does this do? Would it be worth Spotify and Slack breaking when I upgrade my OS?

cosmic_cheese•58m ago

Apple’s attitude here is that it’s an inherent risk of using private APIs, because it’s not something they want devs doing. They don’t facilitate it like MS tends to. Don’t touch the stove if you don’t want to get burnt.

wk_end•44m ago

The person who's getting burnt is Random Officer Worker Joe, who just wants to run Slack and Spotify and who doesn't know a thing about Electron or private APIs, but knows that ever since upgrading their version of macOS things are running terribly. Apple's position is technically noble, but that doesn't help their users.

cosmic_cheese•36m ago

The Electron maintainers should've considered that possibility before reaching for a private API. It's on the Electron's team's shoulders and nobody else's.

If I were building a FOSS platform, I wouldn't give a second thought to third parties making use of my platform's private APIs. They're private for a reason, whether that be because they're not yet fully baked or because using them can have unintended consequences, they're not intended for public consumption. I especially wouldn't want somebody else's platform to depend on my private APIs, because I am then effectively locked into keeping that API frozen in time by the numerous others building on this other person's platform.

It's generally poor practice to build upon such brittle things as under-the-hood tinkering anyway.

Aurornis•51m ago

We've had developer betas of macOS Tahoe since June.

Standard practice for any mobile or desktop software is to start testing on the betas as soon as they're available. Unless this was a last-minute change before the final release, it's on the software developers to use the betas to prepare their software for upcoming releases.

cosmic_cheese•1h ago

A good argument for allowing and working with minor platform differences instead of trying to micromanage every little aspect to force inter-platform consistency and/or perfect compliance with the mockup.

x0x0•57m ago

Nah, it's Apple's fault. Not regression testing against major apps is pure incompetence.

Also, this in the comment:

> [a user] Please try any way of getting in touch with Apple engineers you can. As a project, we don't have a better connection to Apple than you do.

> One approach might be the engineer who replied to the Bluesky post that someone linked to above about the input issue.

Pure incompetence. Major projects have no way to do anything but ping randoms on socials.

marcosdumay•55m ago

> despite one piece of code making a method private, another piece of code still overrides it/modifies it/calls it, an affront to the idea of encapsulation

That's inherent on the way current computers manage the memory. And I don't know if the gains are enough to pay for the loses of guaranteeing encapsulation.

One could reach for static analysis, but that would imply some restrictions on the machine's assembly. Those are probably worth it.

> a piece of code has different behavior depending on the identity of a function

I have written my quota of "find the latest caller on the stack with property X, verify if it has access", on different languages. Some times a function can't in any way be just a function.

btown•41m ago

There's also the good old use case of "am I dealing with a subclass that overrode the superclass's implementation of the method."

How do you distinguish between a superclass that always returns null/noop, vs. a subclass that happened to return null in this specific case?

Sometimes this is useful/vital for setting expectations to the user what functionality the instance is likely to have.

Now, you could refactor everything to have the superclass's implementation either throw a NotImplementedError, or return a sentinel value... but changing every call site might be a gargantuan task. Similarly, adding static metadata to every subclass might not be feasible. But checking whether the function's (pre-bound) identity is different is a very easy hack!

Ironically, this might indeed be exactly what Apple is doing here, and they're doing it in a tight loop.

ryandrake•34m ago

I don’t understand what goes through the developer’s mind. A method is marked as private. It’s documented as not to be used by developers. Further documentation says that using it may break your application in strange ways now or in the future. Despite all this, the developer concludes: “yea, I think it’s a good idea to use this API!” Then, later when something breaks, it’s Shocked Pikachu all around.

stalfosknight•29m ago

And there are people who's default setting is to hate/blame Apple because it's fashionable to do so and they are defending not just the use of but also overriding an API explicitly marked as private.

I don't get it.

cyberax•28m ago

Yeah, but you HATE how the system behaves because some great spark at Apple thought that corners must always be _this_ rounded.

thfuran•6m ago

The alternative to using private methods or reflectively mucking about with library/platform internals isn't always "do the same thing but with only public API"; it's sometimes "you can't possibly fix the bug or implement the feature that you want to". It sure does increase maintenance burden though.

kccqzy•15m ago

I have written my share of "inspect caller and do things" too. I still don't like that.

snarfy•41m ago

It's all pretty terrible. For problem (1) why does the language allow it? And why are they doing it this way? Did Apple not provide an official way?

cosmic_cheese•33m ago

With Objective-C's nature as a dynamic language, there's no way to make APIs fully private and unusable to third parties. Despite heavily embracing Swift in recent years, much of AppKit and UIKit are still written in Objective-C.

SkiFire13•40m ago

> (2) a piece of code has different behavior depending on the identity of a function, contrary to the principle of extensionality.

Note that most definitions of extensionality don't consider the number of steps to achieve the result as an observable property, although in practice it is.

cyberax•34m ago

Abuse of private APIs means that your public API is incomplete. And that people dislike how your system behaves so much, that they're willing to muck with its internals.

stalfosknight•24m ago

No, it means some people are doing it wrong either because:

1. They don't know how to do it the right way

2. They can't be bothered to do it the right way

#1 I can understand. We all make mistakes as we learn and grow as developers. #2 is just arrogance / laziness on the part of the developer. Compounding it by blaming the platform owner that clearly and explicitly told you not to go that route is gross.

cyberax•23m ago

Please. With Apple it's mostly:

3. There is no documented way to do it.

stalfosknight•16m ago

I'll grant that their documentation isn't the best I've ever seen, but it is still on you if you reach for private APIs. Again, that is consciously choosing a shortcut you've been explicitly told not to use.

huijzer•1h ago

Don't Electron-based apps cause lag on basically any system?

GuinansEyebrows•1h ago

Perhaps, but this specific case appears to be related to (ab)use of a private API on Electron's part.

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311#issuecomme...

nkozyra•1h ago

I know it's a defacto complaint to leverage against Electron apps, but memory usage notwithstanding, I've never run into much lag issue on any major Electron app.

ToucanLoucan•1h ago

It depends. Numerous times when internet is spotty Slack and Discord both on different occasions have brought my systems to a halt until they can complete whatever task is stuck waiting (or I force close them).

It's really fucking obnoxious that somehow a goddamn web app in a wrapper is managing to cause system wide hangs.

Vilian•1h ago

True, i'm gonna start limiting electron apps CPU and IO percentage to not halt everything

nsriv•44m ago

I think that's probably a recipe to hit the limits more often and end up being more frustrating, depending on your hardware.

arcfour•42m ago

Surely there is a more effective way to write an app than to bundle an entire end-of-life browser and Node.js runtime into a 600MB monstrosity.

hluska•33m ago

Of course there is, but not every decision in computing is (or should be) about raw efficiency.

mcintyre1994•40m ago

I’ve never noticed anything before, though I’m sure their performance is worse than native apps. I think the M series has so much headroom at this point that you can get away with a lot.

nottorp•36m ago

It's in the runtime specifications, I think.

"Application should use all cores and all available memory."

In the past few years, the only applications i've seen run amok with memory usage at least were of course Electron based.

However, note that this problem is on Mac OS "users had too much contrast so we ruined it" 26 Tahoe. It's part of the early adopter experience.

altairprime•12m ago

[delayed]

schmidtleonard•1h ago

Discord and VSCode work smoothly for me on an M4 MBP -- not sure if it's a compatibility difference or just performance hiding the problem, though.

But Spotlight file search is completely broken, rebuilding the index doesn't help, and web results are the only thing it returns. After 20 years of intense research, Apple finally caught up to Microsoft in race to make search broken and useless.

jama211•1h ago

Search works great for me, I’m sorry it broke on your machine but it needs to be broken for everyone to be on Microsoft’s level

schmidtleonard•1h ago

Haha fair enough, and now it's fixed on my machine but Windows Search is still asking if you'd like Bing with that.

jama211•45m ago

Hahaha always with the bing

navigate8310•12m ago

It's funny, bing literally means disease in Mandarin.

duskwuff•1h ago

> But Spotlight file search is completely broken, rebuilding the index doesn't help, and web results are the only thing it returns.

I had the same issue; killing Spotlight processes fixed it. (A reboot would probably do the job too.)

schmidtleonard•58m ago

Hey it worked. Thanks!

(Killing the process, ofc)

tw04•58m ago

M4 works great for me. M1 Max with 64gb of memory consistently has issues.

JumpCrisscross•46m ago

For what it’s worth, my 2020 M1 normal is chugging along like the champ that it is :).

jeffbee•38m ago

The instructions for fixing a Mac's corrupted spotlight index are amazing. I was planning to do it earlier this year, but the number of manual actions was just too ridiculous. Then, after it was broken for months, it spontaneously started working again.

brailsafe•12m ago

It's very possible that the hardware performance is hiding the issue. I upgraded from my 2020 intel 13" mbp (16gb of ram, 4-core i5) to 16" M4 Pro for a variety of reasons, but the basic processes of MacOS were making it nearly inoperable periodically throughout the day. I gifted the old one to my gf, and I can hear the fans spin up from across the apartment when nothing else is happening but indexing. I recall regularly being irritated that I'd just have to wait a while for the indexing process to finish before getting anything done. Idk wth is going on, but it puts far more strain on the system than anything else I could throw at it except games and Docker. Even ProTools doesn't seem to produce audible noise unless a bad plugin or a rendering is taking place.

Aside from that, the Settings menu memory leak (or whatever it the problem is) is very much more apparent on the older mac than it is on the new one, but it's still reproducible. Neither computer is running Tahoe yet, these issues were already present, but based on on your comment, they might now be functionally worse in addition to being a performance and user experience joke.

efitz•1h ago

I was just noticing the stuttering and lag but I hadn’t tracked it down to electron yet.

OGEnthusiast•1h ago

FWIW haven't experienced this at all on an M4 Max (with Slack and VSCode open).

Etheryte•46m ago

To be fair, the M4 Max is such a beefy machine that you could do a lot of things wrong and still not notice it.

OGEnthusiast•41m ago

True, but looking at Activity Monitor I don't see any CPU or GPU spike when having an Electron app open and scrolling in Chrome (vs scrolling without any Electron apps open)

STRML•16m ago

Watch your power usage. With large windowed VSCode or Cursor, you will see far higher CPU and GPU usage by WindowServer and more system power consumption. It’s easier if you track it with stats.app.

masklinn•5m ago

Apparently the issue has to do with shadows rendering, so could be a question of capabilities not capacity e.g. older gens have less range and some non-default require falling back to software whereas newer gens can keep to hardware.

kace91•1h ago

I’m surprised to see so little pushback in press to iOS/macOS 26.

I’ve been part of the public beta and it’s been so weird going from “this sucks but it’s a first beta” through “it really isn’t improving much as time goes by” to “we’re a week from launch, there’s no way they release this after the Apple Intelligence fiasco”.

And yet here we are. Performance issues, ui inconsistencies and garish design everywhere.

coolspot•1h ago

Yeah, screen time for kids is absolutely broken in iOS 26.

Fwirt•57m ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this. They absolutely destroyed Guided Access in iOS 26 to the point of borderline non-functionality. I've had the system idle-sleep while in Guided Access and wake to a lock screen that I was unable to interact with in any way, including turning off guided access. Softlocked my device for about 5 minutes until panicked swiping and button mashing managed to snap it out of it. There appears to be a race condition with the lock screen and home screen, if the device idle sleeps in guided access mode then about 50% of the time it wakes to the home screen instead of the app. Sometimes waking it on iOS shows the lock screen for a brief second before the app starts. Also, exiting guided access sometimes doesn't recolor the apps on the home screen so it still appears as if all apps are disabled. Not to mention that they reclassified the pen settings dialog as a "software keyboard" meaning that in order for my kids to draw with the Apple Pencil I also have to allow them to enter text now. None of these were issues on iOS 18.

MBCook•57m ago

I think you mean “since release”.

Hasn’t it always had horrible problems? I’ve never heard a good thing about it in use.

Fwirt•48m ago

I used it from iOS 15-18 and it always worked great. We try to limit our kids' iPad use to drawing in Freeform and the occasional edutainment app, and I never had issues with them escaping Guided Access or it causing lockups. The fact that I can barely trust it to work properly on iPadOS 26 is a huge disappointment for me.

_0xdd•1h ago

I'd hate to suggest this, but I'm concerned that outlets are hesitant to critize Apple for fear of them losing access.

kace91•1h ago

That would make sense for the mainstream outlets, but I’d expect a large number of influencers jumping on the bandwagon of “apple in hot water!!”.

wswope•59m ago

> Performance issues, ui inconsistencies and garish design everywhere.

Hasn't that been Apple's norm for a few years now?

Not trying to land a cheap dunk here; I've honestly been running into rough edges and bad design with every major release for a long time.

nixpulvis•58m ago

Yep

kace91•19m ago

>Hasn't that been Apple's norm for a few years now?

Not to this degree.

I’ve had 3 memory leaks in native apps, including the calculator. There’s basic alignment errors pretty much everywhere. In many places text can become fully unreadable (black on black, white on white, text over a transparent background with overlapping text below…).

It’s not slightly lowered quality, it’s the kind of inconsistency you expect mixing custom launchers and icon packs.

Fwirt•50m ago

I was going to wait for a few bugfixes until I upgraded, but I was forced to update to iOS 26 because the AirPods Pro 3 that I bought required it for some inexplicable reason (which I didn't know until I tried to pair them). The AirPods are just fantastic in every way and a huge leap forward, I don't regret buying them for a second. But sheesh, none of the OS updates were ready for release. I found 3 obvious bugs (non-functional UI elements, invisible labels due to incorrect handling of dark mode, soft locks caused by guided access) not to mention a distinct pause when unlocking the device, GPU issues with Safari. It seems like the pendulum has swung from Apple making mediocre overpriced hardware and reliable software, to making best-in-class hardware and garbage software. I'm hoping that with the end of Intel support we get a "Snow Leopard" style polish and bugfix of the entire stack, but with their recent track record it seems unlikely. It's just inexcusable for a company with Apple's focus on consumer products and market cap. At least Microsoft has the excuse that they have a sprawling empire to oversee.

b_e_n_t_o_n•48m ago

I upgraded on launch and didn't notice anything too wrong. I like the UI and performance seems fine?

pier25•40m ago

Tahoe is the worst macOS release I've ever experienced in 20 years. I think not even Yosemite was that bad.

altairprime•1h ago

Notes from the Google bug tracker linked by the GitHub issue: applying this command to each Chrome/Chromium app impacting your system will workaround the underlying macOS resource leak (EDIT: which only occurs when Electron mucks with private APIs to fake having native UI):

    defaults write com.google.Chrome NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled -bool false

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/446481994#comment17

That command’s equivalent is being patched into Chrome and will have to ripple downward into Electron apps; directing complaints to each electron app impacted with a link to the relevant Google issue workaround will give them sufficient data to mitigate it, if they bother to.

Apple is already aware — https://x.com/ian_mcdowell/status/1967326413830472191 (apologies for the Twitter link, but it’s an Apple employee). EDIT: Someone else has traced the issue to Electron messing with internal OS APIs! Courtesy of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45377253 —

> It turns out Electron was overriding a private AppKit API (_cornerMask) to apply custom corner masks to vibrant views.

ps. This issue was discussed a week ago here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292019

pps. Manually applying this workaround without scheduling its future removal has a slight but non-zero risk of someday breaking OS-linked autofill in your electron apps in weird or unexpected ways.

ppps. I don’t work for anyone, school for another three years minimum.

ThePowerOfFuet•33m ago

>hxxps://x.com/ian_mcdowell/status/1967326413830472191 (apologies for the Twitter link, but it’s an Apple employee)

https://xcancel.com/ian_mcdowell/status/1967326413830472191

FTFY :)

altairprime•23m ago

“And yet”, she persisted, “my apology remains necessary.”

nntwozz•56m ago

I'm a simple man, I see Electron I don't install.

reaperducer•34m ago

Awesome if you're a one-man-band.

Not awesome if you're in a large company where you have to communicate with others and don't get to choose the medium.

modeless•29m ago

I find Slack and Discord to work fine in browser tabs and never felt the need to install their desktop apps. VSCode/Cursor is the only Electron app I felt actually provided value.

rvz•52m ago

Well, that's...Electron for you.

The most inefficient solution (in both space and time complexity) being suggested to build desktop apps is now shown to be causing widespread sluggishness.

So much for interviewing developers for algorithms and data structures. Also Rust won't save you or make Electron faster either.

IgorPartola•48m ago

1. This is about a specific bug, not about Electron in general.

2. What better cross platform GUI alternative do you suggest?

ttoinou•22m ago

   The most inefficient solution (in both space and time complexity)

Those are not the only qualities / metrics to optimize for. Developer eXperience, cross platform, open standards, easy compatibility with websites, easiness to keep updated etc. can be far more important

c-hendricks•30m ago

It's not limited to Electron applications:

https://github.com/neovide/neovide/issues/3225

Other Tahoe issues with non-Electron apps:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/33182

https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/7255

bdash•30m ago

This affects some of the most widely used applications on the platform, including "productivity" applications such as Slack that Apple uses internally. How did no-one at Apple notice this and do something about it prior to macOS 26 being released?

cosmic_cheese•5m ago

I stopped using the Slack Electron wrapper as soon as Safari added support for "installing" web apps (File > Add to Dock…). Wouldn't be surprised if people within Apple did similar.

electric_muse•16m ago

Anyone ever experience Zoom meeting lag that reproducibly connects with receiving a Mac notification?

I've had this issue on my M1 and now my M4 mac for about a year now, and I can't figure it out. Uninstalling and reinstalling hasn't helped.

Literally, someone can reliably send me a slack notification in a meeting (even when DND is on) and cause my Zoom outbound video to get gummed up.

Edit: I ask because I wonder if it has to do with this.

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