ARArathorn·Sep 22, 2023
https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/blob/master/doc/SD... is the best option currently.
In Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrixelement-hq
hydrogen-web
TypeScript2020–2023
element-hq / hydrogen-web
hydrogen-web
Lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support
5Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
711GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM 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 year12 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-08-22 09:03:42 UTC to 2023-09-22 20:22:45 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
12 sourcesIt’s using normal Matrix olm/megolm double ratchet encryption.
To track the identity of who you’re talking to we can do TOFU and/or normal out of band Matrix verification as per https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/issues/518 - but this isn’t yet exposed in Chatterbox. We’ll get it added, as without verification you obviously can’t spot a MITM.
In Element (Matrix) launches Chatterbox, end-to-end encrypted embedded chatYour UI complaints apply only to Element (the flagship client) rather than to Matrix the protocol. As others have said, there are other, less-flashy clients available (and others under development).
Some examples:
Quaternion: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion
Hydrogen: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web
Nheko: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko
In Leaving Freenode for a new networkI can relate, and agree front-end frameworks and tooling feel overly complicated.
The good news is that there is another way. It's completely feasible to develop without any tooling but a static web server and a browser nowadays. Just bundle for production.
I've developed [1] (a +10k LoC chat app) and [2] (a small web app) using just a 600 LoC template library [3] (which I should really extract), and I vastly prefer it over more traditional setups. Being so close to the browser makes it so easy to see what is going on. I've never spent hours or days debugging the infrastructure code because there is barely any, which is usually what ruins the fun for me.
Everybody is different, but for me the accidental complexity of the commonplace front-end stack (webpack, react, typescript, ...) isn't worth what you get out of it.
1: https://github.com
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> I'm rather convinced at this point that all of these people chanting "Can we just go back to traditional approaches!" have never built a web app of reasonable complexity, never used something like React, or have some sort of combination of FOMO and/or comfort in their long-held approach.
I've got plenty of React & front-end experience and vastly prefer a thin library on top of the DOM than something like React, also for large applications. React is ok if all goes well, but when you have to debug or profile something, all the complexity behind the scenes occludes what you are looking for. Most of the time, people want JSX so you need a transpiler. Also keeping up with changes in new React releases seems like a lot of lost time.
I've been building [1] without a transpiler and just a 600 lines template library (see [2]), and it has been s
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uch a breath of fresh air. The fact that there is so little code between you and the browser makes it very easy to see what is going on. Call stacks of max around 15 frames.
It sounds like you are comparing React to jquery code without components, and I justed wanted to highlight that DOM APIs have evolved since those days, and that you don't need a library like React to structure your code.
React has popularized good ideas in front-end development, like components, but I think the complexity cost of a virtual DOM is often underestimated.
1: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/
2: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/blob/master/src/pl...
Matrix's resource utilisation is improving very rapidly at the moment.
Dendrite is still in beta, and hasn't been tuned that much yet, but every release has had a substantial improvement. In other words, if you're not using today's release (0.3.5) you're on stale data. For context, dendrite.matrix.org (running 0.3.5) has ~5K users on it, and is in ~3K rooms spanning 162K users... and its RAM usage is stable at 488MB (occasionally spiking to 2GB during traffic spikes). This doesn't seem unreasonable at all for a chat server of that size. Meanwhile, Synapse has been steadily improving too.
On the client side, Hydrogen (https://hydrogen.element.io, https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web) is our next-gen client implementation, which gives you full E2EE, complete with backup (I have no idea what Durov is banging on about in the OP) - an
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d uses 14MB of RAM for an account in 3,000 rooms spanning 350K users (i.e. my personal one). This is an 100x improvement on Element Web which uses 1.4GB for the same account, although there's also a lot of optimisation that can be done there too.
If I was going to criticise Matrix, I'd focus more on the fact that there are still a lot of papercuts on Element's UX which are holding us back. We're painfully aware of this though and are trying to fix as rapidly as we can.
it’s a entirely new codebase; probably best way to visualise progress is to look at the contributor graphs at https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web
In Slack is downCerulean doesn't have E2EE yet because it deliberately doesn't use a Matrix SDK but just talks simple raw Matrix directly via HTTPS. However, it'd be easy to swap out for a real SDK like the one in https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web to get E2EE (or pipe it via pantalaimon :)
In Cerulean: Experimental micro-blogging app for Matrixhttps://matrix.org/blog/2020/09/15/gsoc-report-html-embeddab... was a GSOC project this year which heads in that direction. Meanwhile Hydrogen has been built to be embeddable (https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web). And Gitter of course has http://sidecar.gitter.im/.
But nobody has fully packaged one up as FOSS Disqus/Intercom/etc alt yet. It's a huge and easily-fillable gap in the Matrix ecosystem :)
In Gitter now speaks MatrixThe hydrogen client for matrix.org (1) has an interesting approach using vanilla JavaScript and indexeddb.
From a previous this week in matrix(2): "Hydrogen tries to be the lightest Element. It is written entirely in vanilla javascript (no React, no Webpack) for complete control, structured as an MVVM app, leveraging the raw performance of indexeddb."
(1) https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web
(2)https://matrix.org/blog/2020/08/14/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...
In If Not SPAs, What?Beyond the general idea of Matrix itself, a nice snapshot of all the stuff currently happening in the Matrix ecosystem right now is the This Week In Matrix blog series, which goes out every Friday. This week’s one is at: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/08/21/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...
Some of the stuff I’m personally most excited about right now is Hydrogen (https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web): a super lightweight web client which heavily leans on indexeddb for storage and so minimises RAM. My primary account has 3000 rooms and about 450K visible users - on element-web this uses 1.1GB of RAM, but on hydrogen it uses 14MB :) We’re also looking at glueing E2EE into Hydrogen via the crypto layer of matrix-rust-sdk, which could be a massive win in terms of reusing and auditing a robust safe implementation for the Hard problem of encryp
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tion, rather than implementing it from scratch every time in every new client.
Dendrite (go server impl) progress is also very promising - we’ve been focusing on it (at last!) since the beginning of the year, and going to enter beta in the next few weeks. A typical small/medium live server is currently using 57MB of RAM (rather than synapse’s ~500MB). We haven’t started optimising yet :)
Synapse has also finally come of age - the whole codebase has almost been switched to twisted/asyncio rather than twisted deferreds, which both speeds things up a bit but also gives us way better visibility on profiling for future perf work. Almost all bits now scale horizontally (apart from the master dispatcher process). Synapse isn’t going away - we see Synapse and Dendrite coexisting much as Apache and nginx coexist today.
Conduit is also super exciting as an entirely community developed Rust homeserver, which currently runs ~10x faster than either Synapse or Dendrite (but doesn’t federate yet, or scale horizontally). It’s really fun to see an indie FOSS server implementation properly take off :)
Finally, P2P Matrix is coming together well - compiling Dendrite to WASM and running it clientside, using Yggdrasil currently as an overlay network to tunnel through to other P2P nodes.
In short: the Matrix ecosystem is in a fairly healthy place right now - the next gen of clients and servers should be incredible :)