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by akurilin 4000 days ago
I've been using slack just fine in the browser, haven't had much of a need for a desktop version of it.

I can just make a separate chrome instance for it and move it into its own xmonad workspace and switch to it much more conveniently than through alt-tab.
3 comments
ashark 4000 days ago
The desktop application for Slack is basically the same thing as having a dedicated browser window anyway, except probably even heavier-weight, at least in the OS X version. IIRC they use the same JS-on-the-desktop toolkit as Atom, so it's not a desktop application so much as it is a "desktop application". It eats ~400MB(!!!!) of RAM on my laptop at all times and I'm sure the only reason it isn't painfully unresponsive is because modern machines have enormous amounts of processing power. Totally unreasonable for what it does.

Even at that, it's still not as rough on system resources as a browser tab with Asana loaded and left open for a couple days, and all of Google's "applications" are hogs of course. Web Apps: the way of the future! [gag, gag, vomit]

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tlinton 4000 days ago
V8 has an odd habit of not releasing memory back to the OS after mark-and-sweeps. It's a minor performance boost to let it roll up memory and it isn't uncommon for it to hog up as much memory until a heuristic (or an OS signal) tells it to knock it off.
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ashark 4000 days ago
Apparently "hey, I'm trying to use this 4GB machine for actual work with a couple VMs running and you're driving me in to swap hell" didn't come through as "knock it off".

And that's the story of why I have an 8GB machine now :-/

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dharma1 4000 days ago
Even the Slack native app is (or at least used to be) a webview wrapped in a native container
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pbreit 4000 days ago
One anecdote from a power user is rather uncompelling.
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