Microsoft doesn’t make good native apps for Windows 11 anymore, and it’s been setting a trend for other companies, too. Microsoft’s close partner, OpenAI is no exception, which has released a new “ChatGPT app for Windows 11 and Windows 10”. Unfortunately, in our tests, Windows Latest observed that it’s a web wrapper in an Electron container.
ChatGPT app for Windows 11 is in the early stage of development, and it’s only available for those with Plus, Team and Enterprise. OpenAI warns that it’a an “early access”, so the performance and overall experience would not be up to the mark, and it promises that bigger changes are coming.
While “bigger changes’ might be coming, I don’t think OpenAI plans to ditch Electron for a more native framework. ChatGPT is not even using WebView2, which is recommended by Microsoft when building “web apps”. Also, what’s particularly interesting is that ChatGPT for macOS is a native app that follows Apple’s design and quality guidelines.
In our tests, Windows Latest downloaded and installed the ChatGPT app for Windows 11, and we immediately noticed that it’s an Electron Chromium wrapper when we looked at the resource usage in Task Manager.
I also extracted the content of the app, and as shown in the above screenshot, ChatGPT app in Windows 11 is indeed an Electron app.
This is clear from several files in the folder. For example, chromium-related files such as chrome_100_percent.pak and chrome_200_percent.pak are often found in Electron apps because Electron runs on Chromium.
Additionally, files like ffmpeg.dll, v8_context_snapshot.bin, and libEGL.dll aro also bundled with Electron apps.
The reason the ChatGPT app size is close to 260MB is because it bundles a lot of Chromium files.
On the other hand, Copilot for Windows 11 is less than 600KB in size. That’s a massive difference, and Copilot (v2) is as responsive as ChatGPT’s Electron app for Windows 11.
While Copilot uses Microsoft Edge WebView2, which is pre-installed in Windows 11 and shared system wide, ChatGPT app bundles the entire Chromium and Node.js runtime, and it runs its own own instance of Chromium. This leads to increased RAM and storage usage at no extra benefit.
I’m not against the idea of using Electron, but the problem with this particular framework is that it consumes a lot of resources. Also, if OpenAI wanted to ship a poor web app, it could have used WebView2. Or it could have at least tried building a native Windows App SDK-based app, as they did for macOS.
Microsoft technically has 49% of OpenAI’s equity, but it turns out that is not enough to build a full-fleged native app for Windows 11.
One thing I liked about the new ChatGPT app for Windows is the picture-in-picture mode
You can use the Alt+Space keyboard to open ChatGPT in a small container, but remember that the shortcut conflicts with PowerToys, so you’ll need to remap it to something else using PowerToys.
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below.