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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

#2

Post by acemarke »

Really neat to see how Redux's design and extensibility make this kind of action serialization and store synchronization possible. There was another similar example recently where someone was synchronizing multiplayer game states via Redux actions [0]. There's actually quite a few addons available related to store synchronization [1].

[0] http://jimpurbrick.com/2017/01/04/vr-redux/ , http://jimpurbrick.com/2017/07/04/react-vr-redux-revisited/

[1] https://github.com/markerikson/redux-ecosystem-links/blob/ma...

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#5

Post by CharlieHess »

forsaken wrote: post #4

Tried the new beta: it lost all my configured networks, and I had to re-add them all. Otherwise, it seems _way_ faster than the old one, and definitely an upgrade.

Hey, author here. :wave: If you don't mind doing Help > Report Issue it'll submit your logs and we can see what went down.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#7

Post by afandian »

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 more than Adium: web previews, document previews, pulling in pre-rendered fragments from the server and modular stylesheets. I wonder how much RAM Adium would have used to do the same things, and I wonder how much time the developers of an equivalent cross-platform app would have spent if they had been split trying to optimise lots of different platforms. They would essentially be re-inventing a modular layout and rendering engine (aka a web browser).

I don't know what the answer is. Maybe the detractors would prefer that the app did less. I know I'd prefer not to have previews and emojis, but I'm sure my colleagues find them useful.

(EDIT: Per reply below, turns out Adium did use a web view for presentation!)

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#9

Post by wlesieutre »

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…

If I’m not mistaken, the actual chat contents in Adium were rendered with web views, and its configurable message styling was done with HTML/CSS. The whole program wasn’t stuffed in the web view though, it was a presentation layer on top of a native backend.

EDIT- here’s a source on that http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/12/19/adium-chatting-...

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#10

Post by nartz »

I think this article is really helpful when deciding to use a nascent technology (Electron) in production- pretty cool you can create a desktop app with javascript, but at the same time, expect to do a lot of custom bug fixing and hope that there aren't issues in the core code (note: there always are) =D
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