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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

#141

Post by xwvvvvwx »

m_fayer wrote: post #114
SteveNuts wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

32 is already the new 16.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#142

Post by xwvvvvwx »

smashingfiasco wrote: post #129
saagarjha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Messages.app does all of those and uses a tenth of the RAM.

Interestingly, Messages.app on macOS actually is a webview (well, the chat log portion of the window).

do you have a source?

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#143

Post by ihsw2 »

rosser wrote: post #130
mastax wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.NET Framework | Proprietary | Windows 98 or later .NET Micro Framework | Apache 2.0 | Win+Bare Metal .NET Core | MIT License | Win+macOS+Linux(x64+armhf) Xamarin | Proprietary | Android, iOS, and Windows mono | MIT License | Linux Mac OS X, iOS, tvOS, watchOS Sun Solaris BSD - OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD Microsoft Windows Nintendo Wii Sony PlayStation 3 Sony PlayStation 4 Of course "having a runtime" is not the same th…

Thank you. Are those runtimes all bytecode compatible? Or is that another layer of developer cognitive burden that the more efficient/performant/whatever choice entails, atop the whole "having a good way to write cross-platform applications" tangle?

Nope but few (if any) platforms will accommodate such a demand. Xamarin will produce different bytecode from mono, for example.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#144

Post by yellowapple »

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.

"But to get them to show up the same"

That shouldn't be the goal. Linux and Windows have different norms when it comes to UI design, and (usually) have completely different widget appearances. You can save yourself a lot of headaches by just specifying the bare minimum (i.e. the widgets themselves) and letting the user/system remain in control of exactly how they appear.

In other words, if you're treating desktop GUI design as equivalent to web GUI design and expecting your app to look the same across all platforms, you're going to have a bad time.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#145

Post by saagarjha »

xwvvvvwx wrote: post #142
smashingfiasco wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, Messages.app on macOS actually is a webview (well, the chat log portion of the window).

do you have a source?

A quick glance at the view hierarchy (Accessibility Inspector.app can do this) shows that the chat view is just a web view.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#146

Post by yellowapple »

manigandham wrote: post #137
sidlls wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want them to be the same? What percentage of people who use slack on both platforms and who care whether the appearance is the same on both?

Many people expect similar UIs for better branding and easier workflow.

I'd sooner guess that most reasonable people would prefer the UI be consistent within their chosen platform. Yeah, Slack's UI is pretty, but it sticks out like a sore thumb on pretty much every platform because it looks nothing like any of the other applications running on one's machine.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#147

Post by yellowapple »

xwvvvvwx wrote: post #141
m_fayer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

32 is already the new 16.

That's horrifying.

Re: Migrating Slack's Desktop App to BrowserView

#150

Post by ivm »

petemill wrote: post #122
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…

Even if it was done in Xamarin, you'd still need some kind of web client / browser to fetch and render the actual slack workspaces

Why use web at all? IRC clients have been made with native UIs since the 90s.
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