Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

You can think of slack as a small javascript program running inside another operating system VM (chrome), that you have to run in order to essentially chat on IRC. If anyone has time I’d love to see how much spotify, slack and atom (just left open not doing anything) decrease the battery life of a modern laptop. Its like electron, but you don’t need to distribute a copy of chrome to all your users, and we don’t need to run another copy of chrome to use your app.

Source: josephg.com