Deno wants to kill Electron, then ships a 442 MB Hello World
Deno Desktop promises small native binaries by defaulting to the OS webview. One commenter ran the official five-line Hello World on Windows 10 and watched it weigh in at 442 MB.
The bundled Chromium backend is optional, but the libcef.dll alone accounts for 247 MB of that build. The whole pitch is that business logic lives in TypeScript instead of Tauri's Rust and Electron's stack. A game dev still thinks it eats Tauri's lunch; another tester took a quick drive and walked away unimpressed.
Deno Desktop, landing in the canary builds of Deno 2.9, takes a web project and compiles it into a self-contained desktop binary for macOS, Windows, and Linux. It bundles your code, the Deno runtime, and a rendering engine into one redistributable file.
One command, three operating systems, no Rust
The default is the OS-native webview, chosen for small binaries; an optional CEF/Chromium backend gives you consistent rendering at the cost of size. The npm ecosystem stays available through Deno's Node-compat layer. It auto-detects Next.js, Astro, Fresh, Remix, Nuxt, and SvelteKit and runs them unchanged, cross-compiles across targets, and ships binary-diff auto-updates with rollback. Backend and UI talk over in-process channels rather than socket IPC. The framing is explicit: business logic in TypeScript, not Tauri's Rust, positioned against Electron and Electrobun.
The measured weight versus the marketing weight
The "small by default" claim met a scale fast. One reader ran the exact tutorial and reported the result:
"I tried
deno desktop index.tswith the 5-line Hello world in the article. Result (Windows 10): 442 MB. Ouch. I thought it would be smaller than an Electron build, but it's far worse. … (libcef.dll: 247 MB)" — a commenter who measured the official build
Not everyone is deterred by the heft. A game developer reads the same bundled engine as the feature, not the bug:
"this is going to eat a lot of Tauri market. Why would I use Tauri now? The 150mb of additional bundle size is just an extra 1 to 10 seconds of download time … and you get a reliable rendering engine." — a self-described game dev
A hands-on skeptic landed in the opposite place after trialing it:
"I had a quick drive with deno desktop and don't see how it's better. If anything it's lacking in comparison" — a commenter who test-drove it
And the comparison page that sells all of this took a hit of its own. A reader checked Electrobun's docs and found Deno's own framing off:
"Why did they describe electrobun as macOS only? I checked their docs and it has support for Windows, macOS and Linux" — a commenter who read Electrobun's platform support
The split in the thread maps a real fault line: whether a guaranteed rendering engine is worth carrying everywhere, or whether shipping a quarter-gigabyte DLL to render a text box is the exact tradeoff the native-webview default was supposed to avoid.
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