Lighter, faster, simpler: An Element Web for the future

Описание: At FOSDEM 2026, David Baker (Staff Software Engineer and the original author of Element Web) and Florian Duros (Senior Software Engineer) presented an inside look at Element Web - from its early days to the bold plans shaping its future. They shared how the team is modernising the platform to be faster, more reliable and more flexible - all while keeping the experience seamless for the millions of people who rely on it worldwide.

Element Web is the oldest and most widely deployed Matrix client, and could well be the most widely deployed decentralised comms client in active service, especially when considering its many forks (Tchap, openDesk Chat, BundesMessenger, SchildiChat, LuxChat, etc.)

Over the last 11 years it has accumulated a very significant amount of technical debt, and we believe that one of the main ways to accelerate the uptake of decentralised communication would be to be radically improve the codebase. This means not doing a rewrite, and instead figuring out how to carefully switch the engine mid-flight from matrix-js-sdk to matrix-rust-sdk running in WASM, ensuring Element Web benefits from all the improvements which have landed in the Element X mobile apps, while simultaneously stopping reinventing the wheel between the two stacks. We'll demonstrate experiments with Aurora as our playground for running Element Web's react components on top of matrix-rust-sdk, and explain how we hope to bring decentralised comms to a wider audience by making Element Web as performant and snappy as Element X.

This talk should be of extreme interest to anyone who has ever complained about Element Web being slow or RAM hungry, and who wants to see a world where decentralised comms can outrun the centralised alternatives!