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Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

slack.engineering

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Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#91

Post by LeoNatan25 »

Twirrim wrote: post #26
saagarjha wrote: post #3

The screenshot shown in the article shows Slack using well over 600 MB of RAM. I'm not sure I find this acceptable for a chat app with four "tabs" open.

I was happy when we moved from the HipChat client that used several hundred MB of RAM over to Slack which is proving to at least be more svelt. I really don't want to go back to another RAM hog. It's not like my laptop is just brimming with extra RAM, and being a Mac of course the RAM isn't user upgradeable. My choice shouldn't be "be present in chat, or carry out work". Guess it's time to figure out IRC integration.

Use the Safari version of Slack. Push works and the Safari web content process is much smaller.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#92

Post by jdelaney »

amedvednikov wrote: post #18
afandian wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When these kinds of things come up there's often complaint that desktop apps running in the browser are inefficient. As it happens, I agree. An old favourite of mine, Adium, probably never used 600 MB because I'm pretty sure my PowerBook G4 had less RAM than that. But I think it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that these apps should be written in a native framework rather than a web view. Slack is doing much mo…

That's why I'm developing eul, a lightweight native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Facebook etc: https://eul.im It's only 4 MB and handles tens of thousands of Slack messages in one chat without lag. 1.0 release is going to be out in early November.

Looks awesome! I saw you said it was written in Go and I've been looking for a good Go GUI library. Which one are you using?

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#93

Post by SomeCollegeBro »

peoplewindow wrote: post #82
brightball wrote: post #36

As a Linux laptop user, I fully endorse Electron. There’s so much more available for Linux because of it that would have no client at all otherwise. Between NVMe disks and the ability to have 64gb of RAM if I want...keep it coming. I’d rather have heavy software than no software.

Why? Electron apps still have to be packaged for Linux. And cross platform apps can be written in Qt or Java too. Doesn't seem like Electron is the thing making the difference here.

Have you actually written a large scale cross platform app for Linux and Windows? Sure, Qt components will show up on both platforms. But to get them to show up the same tends to be an incredible headache, especially if custom styling is applied.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#94

Post by criddell »

amedvednikov wrote: post #81
tstieff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that concerns me about any 3rd party chat application is that it's difficult to know if my data is secure. Any thoughts on open sourcing your application?

Yes! I want to make it open source, from my experience that's the best option for all parties. Unfortunately it won't be possible to open source some parts of the app. I'm setting up a company right now to increase trustworthiness. Like the home page says, no data will ever be shared with anyone and soon it will be possible to verify this.

> Unfortunately it won't be possible to open source some parts of the app.

Why is that? Are you licensing code from somebody else?

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#95

Post by Yhippa »

cdolan wrote: post #74
lwansbrough wrote: post #45

What the hell is taking up all that RAM? Slack is using over 800MB of RAM on my computer right now, and it's completely idle. I've got a C# process on my computer right now handling thousands of messages per second and consuming 1/20th the RAM. If you rebuild Slack in Xamarin you'd probably drop your RAM consumption to under 50MB, just a guess. JS fiends are gonna tell me C# ain't JS, and I agree. TypeScript ain't JS…

Just pulled up Activity Monitor - Slack + helpers are using over 1 GB while at rest.

Not sure if it's because of the amount of groups I've added but I'm using ~1.8 GB compressed on my MBP.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#96

Post by criddell »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #40
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe the detractors would prefer that the app did less. Sorry, that argument just does not hold water. On my Mac currently, MS Outlook is using 483 MB versus Slack using 704 MB, with just one tab open. For all of Outlook's bloat, one can hardly say it does less than Slack; it's just a glorified chat app for pity's sake. Even IntelliJ is using only 2x as much RAM as Slack with 4 medium sized projects open and Intel…

Yea a glorified chat app with video chat, audio chat, screen sharing and screen takeover remotely, file uploading, 3rd party integrations doing multiple things depending on your team setup, etc. I'd hardly call it a glorified chat app.

I'd be interested to see a study of how many users actually use those features. The company I work for mostly switched from using Skype for chat to Slack and I don't think I've ever done anything with it except send and receive plain text a sentence or two at a time.

The only reason we are trying to switch from Skype is for the persistent and searchable history. I say "trying to switch" because about half the company prefers Skype messaging and so now we have to have two clients installed.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#97

Post by amedvednikov »

jdelaney wrote: post #92
amedvednikov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I'm developing eul, a lightweight native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Facebook etc: https://eul.im It's only 4 MB and handles tens of thousands of Slack messages in one chat without lag. 1.0 release is going to be out in early November.

Looks awesome! I saw you said it was written in Go and I've been looking for a good Go GUI library. Which one are you using?

I'm drawing UI manually with OpenGL. It's not easy :)

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#98

Post by randyrand »

dang wrote: post #58
mariusmg wrote: post #6

Sorry.

Yikes, you can't comment like this on Hacker News regardless of how bad a desktop app may be. We ban users who do this, so would you mind reading https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not doing it again? The idea for discussions on HN is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, then don't comment until you do. This isn't only about being nice, it's about preventing…

There's no need to ban. Just put comments like these at the bottom under a "see more comments" button. Then we can accommodate more people.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#99

Post by fragmede »

lwansbrough wrote: post #45

What the hell is taking up all that RAM? Slack is using over 800MB of RAM on my computer right now, and it's completely idle. I've got a C# process on my computer right now handling thousands of messages per second and consuming 1/20th the RAM. If you rebuild Slack in Xamarin you'd probably drop your RAM consumption to under 50MB, just a guess. JS fiends are gonna tell me C# ain't JS, and I agree. TypeScript ain't JS…

It doesn't help that the Slack app is running in dev and not production mode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14899482

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#100

Post by zeveb »

brightball wrote: post #36

As a Linux laptop user, I fully endorse Electron. There’s so much more available for Linux because of it that would have no client at all otherwise. Between NVMe disks and the ability to have 64gb of RAM if I want...keep it coming. I’d rather have heavy software than no software.

> There’s so much more available for Linux because of it that would have no client at all otherwise.

https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack works on Linux, and doesn't chew up CPU, RAM & disk to do it.

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