Comparing Tauri and Electron

#​731 — April 11, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

🤖 Firebase Studio: Google’s New Agentic AI-Powered Development Environment — Buzzing from the success of Gemini 2.5 Pro for dev tasks, Google’s Firebase team gets in on the AI development action with a Cursor/v0/Lovable-a-like of its own for building apps in the browser.

Google

Some Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know in 2025 — A quick list post breezing through a few more modern areas of JavaScript including iterator helpers, structuredClone(), and set operations.

Suren Enfiajyan

Next.js Fundamentals, v4 — Master Next.js with Scott Moss. Learn React Server Components, Server Actions, dynamic routing, authentication, caching, and edge functions. Create a modern React app, deploy it to Vercel, and level up your skills.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Node.js Testing Best Practices — A detailed guide to modern testing in Node from a group of developers who know all about it. It’s on GitHub, but essentially written like a free book covering over 50 battle-tested tips covering areas as diverse as the ‘Testing Diamond’, testing microservices, and simulating flaky networks.

Goldberg, Salomon, and Gluskin

IN BRIEF:

• There’s speculation that the npm registry may have wiped all access tokens. If you’re having problems, the status update recommends creating new tokens while they attempt to restore them.

• ☁️ It’s been a busy week for Cloudflare! It now has an easy way to deploy Next.js apps to Cloudflare Workers, you can add a ‘deploy to Workers’ button to your Git repos, v1 of their Cloudflare Vite plugin has been released, and you can now deploy an entire frontend, backend, and database (supporting React Router, Astro, Vue.js, Svelte and more) in one Worker.

• The RedwoodJS team has an update on the future of Redwood and what the ‘next epoch’ holds for the React-based framework.

• p5.js 2.0 looks like it’ll be with us soon – its eighth beta has just landed. The release notes for beta 2 give an extensive idea of what’s coming.

• 🇷🇴 The annual JSHeroes conference is taking place this May 29-30 in Cluj, Romania.

RELEASES:

• TypeSpec 1.0-RC – Microsoft’s language for defining cloud service APIs and shapes.

• pnpm 10.8 – The alternative, efficient package manager.

• Prisma 6.6 – Popular ORM for Node.js and TypeScript.

• React Native 0.79 – Faster, faster, faster.

• Bun 1.2.9, Tailwind CSS 4.1, CKEditor5 45, Zod 4 Beta

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Comparing Tauri and Electron for Building Desktop Apps — Electron is a natural choice for building JS and HTML-powered cross-platform desktop apps but numerous alternatives have appeared like Neutralinojs and the Rust-based Tauri. This post does a good job of quickly showing how Tauri differs and why you might choose it.

Costa Alexoglou

Mastering Default Values with Nullish Coalescing (??) — Matt’s a big fan of the ?? operator over the || approach, largely due to JavaScript’s ideas of what it considers ‘falsy’.

Matt Smith

How Clerk Integrates with a Next.js Application Using Supabase — Learn how Supabase + Clerk work with Next.js to increase security and reduce development hours.

Clerk sponsor

Accelerating Large-Scale Test Migration with LLMs — How Airbnb completed its first large-scale, LLM-driven code migration in moving from Enzyme to React Testing Library.

Charles Covey-Brandt (Airbnb)

React Reconciliation: The Hidden Engine Behind Your Components — React uses a reconciliation algorithm to update the DOM based on changes to the virtual DOM. Understanding how it works is essential for producing faster apps.

Christian Ekrem

Hiding Elements That Require JavaScript Without Using JavaScript — If you’ve got non-essential features that require JavaScript and you want to hide them for users who have JavaScript disabled for whatever reason, this is a tidy old-school way to do it.

Dade

📄 Debugging JavaScript Memory Leaks in Bun Jarred Sumner

📄 Using Chrome’s (Preview) Prompt API for Data Summarization Raymond Camden

📄 How to Easily Reproduce a Flaky Test in Playwright Nicolas Charpentier

📄 Securing a Vue App with OpenID Connect and the BFF Pattern – That’s Backend-for-Frontend, not Best Friends Forever. Khalid Abuhakmeh

📄 The Case for Web Components with Lit Philipp Kunz

🛠 Code & Tools

Next.js 15.3: Now Including Turbopack Builds — The popular React framework now includes alpha support for using Turbopack for much faster production builds (especially if you have lots of cores available), community support for Rspack, and new navigation hooks.

The Vercel / Next.js Team

Chrono 2.8: A Natural Language Date Parser — Give it a string like “today”, “last Friday”, “2 weeks from now”, or even an entire date and time, and it’ll come up with a date object to suit.

Wanasit Tanakitrungruang

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, Jest, Karma, Jasmine, and more.

Wallaby Team sponsor

🎵 Communicate with Ableton Live via WebSockets — Ableton Live is a popular DAW (digital audio workstation) and this opens up a way to control it from JavaScript.

Ricardo Matias

• 🕒 Spacetime 7.9 – Lightweight timezone library. Now supporting formatting times in SQL ISO format.

• 📊 Perspective 3.5 – Streaming data viz and analytics component. The core is written in C++ and compiled to WASM.

• Embla Carousel 8.6 – Lightweight carousel library with fluid motion and swipe precision.

• simpleParallax.js 6.1 – Add parallax effects to any image.

• Tesseract.js 6.0.1 – Pure JS OCR for 100+ languages.

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of other interesting updates and useful resources from across the broader developer landscape:

• Git has turned 20 years old and GitHub’s Taylor Blau caught up with Linus Torvalds to discuss the milestone and the background to the project.

• Tired of hearing about TypeScript? Why not experiment with programming in PostScript and running games on your printer?

• Minimal CSS-only Blurry Image Placeholders is an article showing off a very clever technique for using CSS to dynamically create blurry image placeholders prior to an image loading in.

• Mozilla’s Simon Pieters tells us that default styles for H1 elements are changing and browsers are starting to roll out changes in default styles for nested section headings.

• Docker has released a new extension for VS Code in a collaboration with the Microsoft Container Tools team.