| I feel that it's not really fair to expect them to natively implement their app on every platform and put tons of resources into it's client performance - anecdotally discord is a very responsive app - see [0]. But think of it this way, all the effort they put into their desktop app works on all major OSes without a problem. They even get to reuse most of the code for access from the browser, with no installation required. Now imagine approaching your PM and saying "Look I know we put X effort into making our application work on all the platforms, but it would be even faster if we instead did 4x effort for native implementations + the browser". [0] From what I've seen in the "gamer community" is that most gamers don't care that much about that kind of extra performance. Discord itself doesn't feel slow once it's started. Joining a voice channel is instant, quickly switching to a different server and then to a chat channel to throw in a some text is fast and seamless (Looking at you MS Teams!!!). Sure Mumble/Teamspeak are native and faster, but where are their first party mobile apps and web clients? One of the incredible things Discord did to really aid in adoption was allow for web clients, so when you found some random person on the internet, you didn't have to tell them to download some chat client, they could try it through their browser first. tl;dr Yes electron apps can be slow, but discord IMO has fine client side performance, and they clearly do put resources into optimizing it. Yes it "could be faster" with native desktop apps, but their target community seems perfectly content as is. |
I do think it's reasonable to get the startup time of Discord to be near what VS Code's startup times are. If we remove the updater, it actually starts pretty fast (chromium boot -> JS loaded from cache) is <1s on a modern PC. And there's so much more we can do from there, for example, loading smaller chunks in the critical "load and get to your messages path" - being able to use v8 heap snapshots to speed up starting the app, etc...
The slow startup time is very much an us problem, and not an electron problem and is something I hope we'll be able to address this year.