Files
Moti ZilbermanandFacebook GitHub Bot 9d3bcb4404 Auto-hide main menu on Windows/Linux (#53511)
Summary:
Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/53511

Changelog: [Internal]

TSIA

Reviewed By: huntie

Differential Revision: D81237715

fbshipit-source-id: 79dac7424e925539ba39706710c743c22d094976
2025-08-28 11:14:59 -07:00
..
2025-08-28 03:46:05 -07:00

@react-native/debugger-shell

npm package

Experimental Electron-based shell for React Native DevTools. This package is not part of React Native's public API.

Why Electron?

The React Native DevTools frontend is based on Chrome DevTools, which is a web app, but is not particularly portable: it's designed to run in Chromium, and Chromium only. Prior to @react-native/debugger-shell, we would run it in hosted mode in an instance of Chrome or Edge.

Relying on hosted mode presents a variety of UX issues in the debugging workflow, such as the need to ask developers to install a particular browser before they can debug in React Native, and the inability to foreground/reuse existing debugger windows when relaunching the debugger for the same app. In order to address these issues effectively, we fundamentally need to leave the browser sandbox and run the debugger in a shell we can bundle with React Native, and whose behavior we can control.

Electron is a tried-and-tested framework for the specific task of embedding a Chromium browser in a portable, customized shell. As a rule we'll hold a high bar for performance and reliability, and we'll only add features to the shell if they are strictly necessary to complement the DevTools frontend's built-in capabilities.