[gmueckl]

Skype... I am actively trying to get rid of it these days. That ridiculous bloated and slow HTML user interface that many native clients have transitioned to (especially Linux and Android) is beyond description. Why does it need to take up 50% of one core when it is idling in the background? On an i7-6800k no less! On my note 8 it drains the battery in no time while managing to be extremely sluggish and unresponsive.

It somehow feels like MS is actively trying to destroy this product.

[seanp2k2]

In Atom (one of the first public releases), I had this plugin that used CSS animations to fade the cursor in and out. It took ~100% of one core to do this. That’s right, in order to fade a color between white and clear, in 2017...

I don’t use that plugin anymore. Electron is dope because it actually delivers on the “one UI across all OSes” but the number of abstractions and the performance hit for this is staggering. It’s not that it needs to be this bad — I don’t think that there’s some specific problem in the technologies, it’s that it /is/ bad in practice. But whatever, my home desktop has 8 cores, 32GB RAM, ~2GB/sec disk reads, and 100mbit internet, so it works with about the same responsiveness as a normal app under Win95 on the hardware of the day.

https://www.forbes.com/2005/04/19/cz_rk_0419karlgaard.html Still as relevant as ever.

[cjsuk]

I believe the answer is because their talent has left and now there are inexperienced comp science grads, UX designers and marketing left and nothing else.

[gmueckl]

So you think that MS is unwilling to pay enough bribes to talented people to keep this product alive? They could certainly afford it.

[cjsuk]

Nope not that. I don’t know anyone who would accept the cash to work on products with such a bad reputation.

If MSFT offered me £100k right here, right now I’d turn it down.

[dboreham]

Skype (on Windows specifically) just doesn’t work for me now. Fails to deliver chat messages, freezes (not necessarily both at the same time).

[gmueckl]

It works for me on Windows but has the annoying habit of popping up s notification for each and every message that arrived while that client was offline. It does not matter if I had already read it in another client. And the notifications come one after the other with some 5 seconds of delay. I cannot find polite words for how annoying that is.