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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

#111

Post by peoplewindow »

SomeCollegeBro wrote: post #93
peoplewindow wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I have. Well, I guess it depends what you mean by large scale. But I wrote and shipped a Windows/Mac/Linux cross platform app using JavaFX with native packaging for each platform. I didn't try and match native widgets. I styled it to look like a desktop app.

It was quite productive and straightforward. That said, Java likes to use as much RAM as it can get even if it could release a lot back to the OS. It looks at it, sees it's free and thinks "I might as well take that".

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#113

Post by djhworld »

Is anyone else getting chat service fatigue?

Looking at my dock I have Discord, Slack, Textual (IRC), WhatsApp Web open.

I wish there was a service that just amalgamated all these together into one thing, with a rough set of common features (e.g. ability to post images/gifs/videos, text etc)

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#114

Post by m_fayer »

SteveNuts wrote: post #48
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.

Same here, it's really nice to have VSCode, atom, slack, etc. RAM is pretty cheap, I'd rather put money towards a better Linux machine than give that money to Microsoft for the OS.

Oh what a lovely cycle. Every dev knows 16gb is the new 8gb so sure, why not have every desktop app consist of 20 independent webview/node processes. Can't wait until 32gb is the new 16gb.

Eventually, when every single desktop app is like this, and we can no longer keep shoving more RAM into computers, we'll realise that the only way to manage such hogs is to pickle background apps to disk Android-style and to just have one foreground app in memory. And that's when we'll all realise we might as well switch to Chrome OS. Well played, web devs, Google says thanks.

Or maybe Electron is a conspiracy by someone heavily invested in RAM production?

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#116

Post by iamatworknow »

codereflection wrote: post #112

I am wishing that the devs on the HipChat desktop apps are paying close attention to this. The Slack desktop app has been a resource hog, but nothing compared to the HipChat desktop app. (All anecdotal evidence)

HipChat's being deprecated in the not to distant future in favor of Atlassian's Slack clone called "Stride".

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#117

Post by ivm »

SteveNuts wrote: post #48
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.

Same here, it's really nice to have VSCode, atom, slack, etc. RAM is pretty cheap, I'd rather put money towards a better Linux machine than give that money to Microsoft for the OS.

> RAM is pretty cheap

Everything is cheap when you have a high salary even by your rich country's standards. There are other users outside of SV.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#118

Post by jorvi »

afandian wrote: post #7
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.

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…

WhatsApp web and Telegram do much of the same (well, besides the WhatsApp web app being nothing more than a front end to your phone as backend) yet WhatsApp uses 500mb.. Telegram (the native macOS that is) consumes around 100mb. So yeah, Electron is bad.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#119

Post by ivm »

amedvednikov wrote: post #97
jdelaney wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

It would be much easier to focus on the core and allow other developers to connect native UIs for each platform.

OpenGL is not accessible and the current UI looks hacky.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#120

Post by iagooar »

How about improving boot time? Nobody talks about it, but since Slack uses so much RAM, I like to close it from time to time and open it when I feel like getting distracted.

But then, it takes 30 seconds (!) from opening the application to being able to type the first message. There is no other app on my MBP that needs so long, and we're talking pretty new hardware with SSD and an i7.

Sorry, but I don't care about your portability across different platforms, I just can't. I want the best experience on mine.

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