Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaitanya | Hacker News Reader

I get why you are saying that, and we are working hard to ensure that our CPU/memory usage stays low. We aren't there yet, but hopefully we should soon be at a point where this is no longer a concern. (Not denying that Webkit based apps have some overhead already, but we are trying to keep the remaining overhead low).

That said, there's a significant advantage to using this approach -- you don't need to build different apps for different desktop platforms, plus it also helps to have same UI across platforms, which is why we went for this.

View on HN

This reasoning is essentially "it's easier for us". I have to use slack for work and it is extraordinarily frustrating to have to use such a ridiculously slow and resource intensive application for sending text messages in 2016. Coupled with the non-native UI (can I right click on that message? Oh no - it's a web page, let's find the cog to click on). Saying that it allows the UI to be the same on every platform to me means that it is not good on any platform. I would take IRC over slack any day at this point.

Oops, also read your message as being from Slack!

No issues, your criticism is still valid. We are working hard towards fixing these issues.

I have evaluated and ditched many messengers over time, and frankly: If you don't offer a native client that keeps itself at <100 Mb usage, and an absolute minimum of CPU usage when not in use, you get relegated to being installed on a trash phone used only for responding to absolute emergencies and even then only with letting the sender know how much i disapprove of their use of the software. I've moved many of my friends and business partners off such disrespectful software over the years, even some who worked on said messengers.

You can try and tweak and fiddle knobs in a website running in a chrome-less browser all day, but you'll NEVER get into an acceptable performance range for an ever-present background process.

And if you can't get there, you don't deserve being used.

Yes, it's cheaper for you. But the costs you pass on to your users (and the environment) are astronomical.

Edit: Also, the spacing in your UI layout looks fine for promotional purposes, but is extremely wasteful and useless for involved conversation, particularly of a technical nature where referring back to earlier bits of the convo is important.

Yeah, and that's completely understandable. However, Slack on my ultraportable Windows laptop just brings the hardware to a halt. I get better performance by just keeping a tab open in my browser so I go with that.

I know it's pros/cons and it helps you push out builds but, man, webkit apps are terrible. On the plus side, the Mac update that was pushed out not that long ago was pretty nice.

EDIT: Oh, you're not from Slack; you're the CTO of Flock. I'm a little tipsy so whoops. What's the difference between Slack and Flock? I didn't really see too much of a difference at first glance.

> What's the difference between Slack and Flock?

We get asked that a lot, so much that we made made a video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDDapdpgCd8 :-)

Here's a summary:

1) Flock is faster and slicker 2) Routine tasks (searching contacts, looking at the most recent messages across conversations, keyboard shortcuts, etc.) are much easier 3) Our API platform, FlockOS, is much more powerful compared to Slack's (see https://docs.flock.co)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com