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element-hq
element-web
TypeScript2017–2026
element-hq / element-web

element-web

A glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web.

68Distinct people
125Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
13.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 1:03:20 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year125 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-02-14 06:05:55 UTC to 2026-04-15 22:22:09 UTC.

01020302017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 28 mentions; 1 submissions, 27 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 30 mentions; 1 submissions, 29 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 19 mentions; 0 submissions, 19 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 2 submissions, 9 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC28127
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC30129
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC19019
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1129
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Element Element (formerly known as Vector and Riot) is a Matrix web & desktop client built using the Matrix JS SDK. Supported Environments Element has several tiers of support for different environments: Supported Definition: Issues actively triaged, regressions block the release Last 2 major versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge on desktop OSes Last 2 versions of Safari Latest release of official Element Desktop app on desktop OSes Desktop OSes means macOS, Windows, and Linux versions for desktop devices that are actively supported by the OS vendor and receive security updates Best effort Definition: Issues accepted, regressions do not block the release The wider Element Products (including Element Call and the Enterprise Server Suite) do still not officially support these browsers. The element web project and its contributors should keep the client functioning and gracefully degrade where other sibling features (E.g. Element Call) may not function. Last major release of Firefox ESR and Chrome/Edge Extended Stable Community Supported Definition: Issues accepted, regressions do not block the release Community contributions are welcome to support these issues Mobile web for current stable version of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on Android, iOS, and iPadOS Not supported Definition: Issues only affecting unsupported environments are closed Everything else The period of support for these tiers should last until the releases specified above, plus 1 app release cycle(2 weeks). In the case of Firefox ESR this is extended further to allow it land in Debian Stable. For accessing Element on an Android or iOS device, we currently recommend the native apps element-x-android and element-x-ios. Getting Started The easiest way to test Element is to just use the hosted copy at https://app.element.io. The develop branch is continuously deployed to https://develop.element.io for those who like living dangerously. To host your own instance of Element see Installing Element Web. To install Element as a desktop application, see Running as a desktop app below. Monorepo This repository is a monorepo hosting Element Web and other related projects in various subdirectories. You can read more about the structure here. Element Web To learn more about Element Web click here Running as a Desktop app Element can also be run as a desktop app, wrapped in Electron. You can download a pre-built version from https://element.io/get-started or, if you prefer, build it yourself. To build it yourself, follow the instructions at https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/tree/develop/apps/desktop. Many thanks to @aviraldg for the initial work on the Electron integration. The configuration docs show how to override the desktop app's default settings if desired. Development Please read through the following: Developer guide Code style Contribution guide Translations To add a new translation, head to the translating doc. For a developer guide, see the translating dev doc. Triaging issues Issues are triaged by community members and the Web App Team, following the triage process. We use issue labels to sort all incoming issues. Copyright & License Copyright (c) 2014-2017 OpenMarket Ltd Copyright (c) 2017 Vector Creations Ltd Copyright (c) 2017-2025 New Vector Ltd This software is multi licensed by New Vector Ltd (Element). It can be used either: (1) for free under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version); OR (2) for free under the terms of the GNU General Public License (as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version); OR (3) under the terms of a paid-for Element Commercial License agreement between you and Element (the terms of which may vary depending on what you and Element have agreed to). Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the Licenses is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the Licenses for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the Licenses. Please contact licensing@element.io to purchase an Element commercial license for this software.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

11 sources
Verification is nothing to do with decryption - verification is how you confirm that you're really speaking to the person you think you're speaking to. What you're describing sounds like a plain old encryption bug, although I'm very surprised you're still hitting it, given encryption in Matrix is pretty stable these days. If you can file a bug on github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues (or element-ios or element-android, depending on what platform you're using) with the full details or reproduction steps, I'll take a look.
In The decentralized web and the future of Section 230
There are two issues filed already which I think sounds similar enough, and from the referenced it obviously scales: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/20431 https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/20143 I think the reason you don't see log reports here is that a condition for this to be problematic is large number of rooms/DMs. We could audit/edit the logs and submit them manually (and perhaps I'll get around to that). I also suspect high-intensity users are more likely to disable telemetry. Just putting out a possible explanation why this issue may be more prominent than can be gathered from analytics. You do seem to recognize the common complaints of slowness (the dismissal of which prompted me to follow up in the first place), and there is at least one GitHub issue open by prominent community members since ~6 mont
Read the rest
hs.
In Element (Matrix) launches Chatterbox, end-to-end encrypted embedded chat
No, it's just been a painful problem to solve. If you're interested, you can see the massive discussion around it at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/228.... The implementations have been around for a while, and as it happens we got to consensus on the spec discussion yesterday, and the PRs to enable it by default in Element Web and Synapse landed an hour ago: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk/pull/2524 https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/pull/22242 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/13273
In Element (Matrix) adds video/voice rooms
Here we go again. We see multiple fissures in the Linux Desktop ecosystem all because of ONE system component. The same happened with systemd vs init.d and now we have this contraption. The alternatives of alternatives madness with system components not working with each other is why many don't bother supporting users on all 'supported' Linux distros altogether and instead target Windows and macOS. It isn't the early days of the Linux Desktop where people are first discovering that 'Linux' exists; it's been over 20+ years and the same chaos in the Linux Desktop is still present. Wayland is another thing to test against, for these poor app developers (especially Electron app / core developers) discovering issues like these two [0][1] which are still happening on their systems. It is totally impossible to support all these Linux users 100%
Read the rest
of the time unlike the other two OSes (macOS and Windows), no matter the many infinite desktop configurations they may have. That is even before I mentioned drivers; especially anything NVIDIA. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983400 [1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/21147
In Are We Wayland Yet?
Not the person you're replying to but following up on an identical past thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30996203 > Linux, x86_64. Getting the same behavior across distros and installations. It is still very much the case. To emphasize, we have for the past couple of years used Matrix routinely on: * Multiple client implementations * Multiple OSs (Linux/Android/iOS) * Multiple accounts and profiles * Multiple Linux distros, desktop environments, window managers, X11/Wayland, CPU architectures (x86_64, aarch64) * Private and public homeservers In particular, multiple accounts on the same Linux installation of element-desktop. The common denominator seems to be that the account with many (thousands) of rooms (almost all of which fully historical/archived with no ongoing activity apart from participants presence) consi
Read the rest
stently gets Element freeze, hang, be extremely slow. This makes element-desktop practically unusable for that account. Other accounts in the exact same environment do not have this issue. Signing in to a fresh profile seems to improve this, for a while, until it starts happening again The same issue does not appear on Element iOS/Android, or with other accounts on the same client. It gets more annoying by the fact that even under normal operations it's slow enough to start up that it can take some time to tell if this time it'll eventually resolve by waiting or if it needs to be force-killed and restarted. This is also the case on an otherwise idle 8-core Ryzen3 with 64GB of RAM and fast NVMe drive sitting close to its homeserver on a 1GBps link. (The slowness seems to be all or mostly locally in Element - even when in a mostly empty room, it can take a very long time expanding/collapsing/navigating the People/Rooms sidebar. This, too, only for those particular high-room accounts and only on element-desktop) For a while we believed it could have been the same cause as this issue[0] but alas, 1.11.0 with Electron 19 has not resolved it. The common factors that consistently exhibits this behavior seems to be Linux, element-desktop, account with large amount of rooms. Been like this for a while now. [0]: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/21147
In Element (Matrix) launches Chatterbox, end-to-end encrypted embedded chat
I'm not OP but a while ago I wrote this comment which you responded to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206569 Since then basically none of the specific bugs I cared about got fixed (that I think could be unbearable to me, some of them definitely are, not sure about all), which are: 8751, 9437, 9811, 10287, 10577, 13263, 13485, 14323, 14424, 15416, 15565, 16123, 16184, 16763, and 16807, all these were all opened before my comment, and everything earlier than 16123 is more than one year old and still open. Maybe one of those is miok's. Newer ones raised since then that also look important to me at first glance: 20046, 20005, 19929, 18458, 17838, 17218. Also there is this closed bug still attracting comments: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/15500#issuec.... As much as I hate NPS scores in the industry, I think thes
Read the rest
e bugs are preventing Matrix from getting new promoters.
In Stories Are Coming to Signal

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