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'Sharing glimpses into our work on Electron'

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Tech Talk: Improving Window Resize Behavior

· 16 min read
nikwen
nikwen

We're launching a new blog post series where we share glimpses into our work on Electron. If you find this work interesting, please consider contributing!

Recently, I worked on improving Electron and Chromium's window resize behavior.

The bug​

We were seeing an issue on Windows where old frames would become visible while resizing a window:

Animated GIF showing the issue where old frames would be shown while resizing windows

What made this bug particularly interesting?​

  1. It was challenging.
  2. It was deep in a large codebase.
  3. As you'll see later, there were two different bugs under the hood.

Fixing the bug​

With a bug like this, the first challenge is figuring out where to start looking.

Electron builds upon Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome. When compiling Electron, Electron's source code is added into the Chromium source tree as a subdirectory. Electron then relies on Chromium's code to provide most of the functionality of a modern browser.

Chromium has about 36 million lines of code. Electron is a large project, too. That is a lot of code that could be causing this issue.