[notatoad]

No company has infinite resources. Maintaining native mac and windows apps to appease the few people who have an irrational hatred of electron doesn't make good business sense when those resources could be going work that actually improves their product in a meaningful way.

[stephenr]

Slack is the only web-app I’ve seen that routinely triggers the safari warning about its resource usage/affect on performance.

For years slack has been a resource pig on desktop and on the web. So what improvements are you imagining they’ve been working on? Chatting on the internet is hardly such a groundbreaking subject that it can’t be done efficiently.

[notatoad]

>So what improvements are you imagining they’ve been working on?

the ones that are described in the blog post that you're currently commenting on

[stephenr]

The very problems that were caused by not having native apps.

Thank you for making my point for me.

[ch_sm]

not irrational. the performance problems can be measured and are noticeable in everyday use.

[notatoad]

how can you measure the performance difference between an app that exists and one that doesn't?

[stephenr]

Chat apps have been around for literally decades. There’s plenty of prior and current competing apps that do essentially the same thing and use a fraction of the resources.

[dmitriid]

Very few prior apps did what Slack is doing [1] And there are not that many actual competitors if you start counting them.

[1] It's still strange to me that many people compare Slack to IRC and XMPP and complain that they were doing all the same things, why have people abandoned them. Even though they (and especially the clients) were doing (or capable of doing) just a small fraction of what Slack is doing.

[notatoad]

there's also web-based chat apps that use next-to-no resources. If slack's webapp is so heavy, what makes you think a native app from the same company would be considerably better?

[stephenr]

I'm not saying I do, really: they seem to be incapable of writing anything efficient, and don't seem to be bothered by that.

[montag]

They are already maintaining apps for each platform.

The question is whether the shared part is written in C++ vs. JavaScript.

[notatoad]

>The question is whether the shared part is written in C++ vs. JavaScript.

also, whether the shared part is 98% of the code or 50% of the code.