[pta2002]

I do want to point out, as someone who uses the WhatsApp app (to me, it’s slightly more convenient than the web version) that the old native windows app was /awful/. It looked native enough, but it just didn’t work. For as long as I remember it would randomly stop accepting input into the text field and I’d have to restart the app, and this was insanely frequent. Typing dead keys was also randomly broken with accents not coming through, which is really annoying if you’re trying to sound professional on a language that requires them.

The new electron app does take more resources, but at the very least it works.

[cm2187]

I see the same bugs. It looks like after ICQ, writing a chat app has become an impossible computer science problem (skype, teams, whatsapp,…). How did that ancient civilisation from the 90s managed to build a functional chat app? The know how is lost to times.

[jeroenhd]

> How did that ancient civilisation from the 90s managed to build a functional chat app?

By only accepting ANSI input, not encrypting any messages, and not bothering to protect users' from remote attacks.

Facebooks's GUI stack for WhatsApp may be rather buggy but on a technical level there's a lot more going on than back in the days of unencrypted TCP connections over plaintext protocols.

Meanwhile, Telegram has an excellent desktop app (despite their terrible protocol), so it's not like the knowledge was lost either.

[cm2187]

SSL and basic encryption isn’t exactly rocket science today. I have not used the telegram desktop app but their web app is completely broken.

[jeroenhd]

Secure, end-to-end, multi-device encryption isn't easy. Plenty of people try and fail to build secure messengers based on top of PGP and Signal's protocol.

I don't use the Telegram web app, but their native apps work excellently. The insertion of ads has been a major disappointment but the chat UX itself is still great, even on native Linux.

[ale42]

But Telegram end-to-end encryption is optional as far as I know.

[jeroenhd]

It is, and it's a good reason to avoid the platform, but they do support E2EE _and_ have a good, native desktop application.

[josephg]

The more time passes, the more impressed I am with mIRC. It was an incredibly fully featured chat client - with hundreds of features, and its own scripting language for more advanced use. All that in a 4mb download. It probably still works great, to this day.

As a teenager, I thought we'd get better at making software over time. Not worse.

[ale42]

It still works great and it's still being updated! https://www.mirc.com/news.html

[qcnguy]

Modern chat apps work better and have more functionality. The knowhow is specifically for Windows chat apps. And the reason the knowledge was lost is that Microsoft sucked at platform design so people stopped learning their platforms and the people who still have the knowledge don't want to go down the career dead end of writing apps for them.

This is partly because MS became insanely complacent. The Windows team is very junior. Just ask anyone who has worked with them. They don't have the skills or resourcing that they did in the 90s.

[jhanschoo]

early ICQ didn't have to support Unicode IMEs either...

[vitorgrs]

If is anything like the WhatsApp Web, "works" might be optimistic choice of word.

When I switched from Windows, the thing that I missed from Windows on Linux was the native WhatsApp App. Now they killed there, so feeling better on my switch now!

[naIak]

The WhatsApp web app is not perfect (no software is) but I’ve never had any major issues with it. It’s snappy and very rarely does it glitch out. I find your comment surprising.

[vitorgrs]

It's a ram hog if you stay the tab open for a while, with ton of messages. So from time to time I need to close the tab and open again.

Huge perf issues because of this.

Also had some serious bugs for a few week. Had to let WhatsApp Web wait for completely sync for 15 minutes~ or else it just stop responding and crashes everything.

[jmkni]

I don't think it is Electron, it's WebView2 https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/Microsoft-edge/webview...

[tomashubelbauer]

Yes, also a heavy user and I'm actually excited about this change. I'm sure the Electron app won't be perfect but I am sure it won't be worse.

[rkomorn]

I agree but also: famous last words. :)

[rkomorn]

IIRC (I tried it last year and gave up) the desktop app also didn't properly deal with archived chats, and maybe some other notifications behaviors.

Maybe this will make me try the desktop app again.

[zelphirkalt]

Sounds like the all powerful mighty Meta didn't have capable engineering working on that app. No idea how that could happen, given that they only hire top talent ...

[jonathanlydall]

While I don’t have as many problems as you seem to, I did notice that it was much slower (like a minute or two) to “connect” after opening the window compared to before.

[dotancohen]

Have you tried telegram desktop to compare? I don't use whatsapp, but I have never had a performance problem with telegram desktop and I've been using it for years on underpowered machines. I usually run some variant of Debian on them.

[wohoef]

Yeah I tried telegram. None of my contacts did though…

[dotancohen]

Yeah, I'm sure that a lot of people notice the same thing then uninstall it. It's one of the solutions to the Fermi paradox, that both people have telegram installed at the same time.