[kijin]

What developers want is important, but what users want is even more important. If a lightweight app is what users want, that's a good enough reason for at least some companies to consider DeskGap over Electron.

I'm sick of sluggish "native" apps on my i7 PC with fast SSDs and 32GB of RAM. I don't even want to imagine how those apps perform on low-end devices.

[icelancer]

> but what users want is even more important

Only developers and very tech-savvy people bitch about Slack. Your average person working in Sales, HR, or operations cares not for the memory footprint of Slack.

It's also not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Yeah, it's slower than mIRC, fair enough. But IRC is dead to almost everyone and Slack took over, so it is what it is.

[saagarjha]

They do, but they misdiagnose it as "my computer is slow" or normalize it because that's all they're used to.

[arvinsim]

Anecdata but I never heard of that complaint for people I know that use Slack.

Maybe the circle I am in simply has great computers. But who knows.

[dmitriid]

Users don’t want a “lightweight app”. Users want an app with <a list of features>.

[arvinsim]

Exactly. If users are held at gunpoint and have to choose between a fast app and a feature rich app, I would bet they will choose the latter.

[userbinator]

Given what counts as "feature rich" these days (and it seems some developers are constantly removing things that users used to use), I doubt that.

Software used to be both fast and "feature rich" (relatively speaking), designed so users could "grow" and learn increasingly more of it. Now almost everything seems to have idiotically dumbed-down "flat" UIs that look simpler yet still manage to consume more resources than before.

The new Skype is a great example. Compare to something like this: https://www.microsip.org/ Yes, I know they're different protocols, but the point is that IM and audio/video call functionality doesn't need to take as much resources as Skype does.

[dmitriid]

The new Skype is a bad example. It's a perfect example of a designed-by-a-committee-of-managers product that tries and fails to understand the moving part of alternatives such as Slack, Facebook Messenger etc.

[jhgg]

The cost savings here is in download/package size, and not runtime performance. Chances are latest chromium is faster than the system web-browser.

[kijin]

Startup time matters. Chances are the system web browser is already cached in memory, whereas every Electron app wants to load its own Chromium runtime.