Why the engine version decides whether your messaging apps keep working
Every messaging aggregator ships its own Chromium. Web services, meanwhile, regularly drop support for older versions. When the gap widens, services go dark one by one, and the next deadline has a date on it.
Why an aggregator ages faster than a browser
Your browser updates itself, silently, every few weeks. An aggregator ships its own copy of Chromium through Electron: that copy only moves when the maintainer publishes a new version of the application. Between releases the gap widens, and it widens at the pace the services choose, not yours. That is why engine upkeep is not an implementation detail: it sets the useful lifetime of the product.
Where the aggregators stand, as of 8 August 2026
| Product | Latest stable | Engine | Position on 9 November |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nexus | 1.0.0 | Chromium 150 | Eight versions above the cut-off |
| Ferdium | 7.1.2, 19 April 2026 | Chromium 138 | Below the cut-off; a tracking issue has been open since 6 August 2026 |
| Franz 5 (open source) | 5.11.0, 9 April 2025 | — | Repository carries a legacy notice since June 2026 |
| Rambox CE | 0.8.0, 21 April 2022 | — | Repository archived; the product moved to paid |
Versions taken from primary sources: the GitHub API of each repository, the official Electron release registry, and Slack’s documentation.
One clarification that matters: Ferdium is not an abandoned project. There are daily commits, automated nightlies, incoming translations and new contributors. What is at stake here is not the project’s activity but the cadence of its stable releases: the only one followed by someone who installs the app rather than a nightly. Nothing technically prevents them from bumping Electron before November.
Check it yourself, in two minutes
Do not take our word for it, and do not take anyone’s word for it: the shipped version can be verified two ways, with no special tooling.
- From the app: add a service pointing at any page that prints your user agent. The string contains a “Chrome/XXX” token: that number is the Chromium version actually embedded.
- From the repository: open the project’s package.json and read the Electron version. The official Electron release registry maps it to an exact Chromium version.
If that number is 142 or lower, Slack stops working inside that application on 9 November 2026.
What Nexus commits to
Engine upkeep is not an implementation detail, it is the product. So the commitment is written down here, and anyone can verify it without asking us.
- Nexus tracks the stable Electron line, and ships an engine update on every major stable release.
- The embedded Chromium version is shown in the application and on this page.
- Updates are automatic: nothing to reinstall to get them.
- If the commitment is not met, it shows without trusting us: the date of the last release and the Electron version are public on the repository.