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by cm2187 212 days ago
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.
4 comments
jeroenhd 212 days ago
> 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.

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cm2187 212 days ago
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.
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jeroenhd 212 days ago
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.

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ale42 212 days ago
But Telegram end-to-end encryption is optional as far as I know.
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jeroenhd 212 days ago
It is, and it's a good reason to avoid the platform, but they do support E2EE _and_ have a good, native desktop application.
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ale42 212 days ago
> have a good, native desktop application.

Indeed. I'm not actively using Telegram, but I tried the desktop application (made with Qt if I remember well), and it's way ahead of what Whatsapp offers. Not to mention it's fast and relatively light.

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josephg 212 days ago
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.

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ale42 212 days ago
It still works great and it's still being updated! https://www.mirc.com/news.html
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qcnguy 212 days ago
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.

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jhanschoo 212 days ago
early ICQ didn't have to support Unicode IMEs either...
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