Slack: Other browsers require significant effort so we're focused on Chrome
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We laud companies that start by doing something small well, yet the second they don't support our platform of choice, it's time to banish them to the hills. (In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?)
We preach focus, then act appalled when customization feature X stagnates on the backlog.
We castigate businesses that spend investor dollars frivolously, and are then furious when well-funded companies act frugally and choose to make tradeoffs (like, say, only supporting one browser for a feature that doesn't work the same on all browsers, until they can achieve a certain quality threshold.)
I look forward to the day when we collectively accept that companies are groups of humans generally working in earnest to do their best, not some faceless behemoth that responds only to screaming "you're awful, do my feature or I'm leaving and tweeting about it" like some petulant child. Maybe there are cases where that is a reasonable response, but when the volume is always turned up to 11 it's hard to tell the real crises from distractions.
I'd argue it's gotten worse over the last few years, to the point that even questioning the attitude or bringing it up in conversation is frowned upon and heavily argued against.
Rather than assuming individuals are just fickle, I think it makes much more sense that individuals are often only vocal about things they disagree with. We as readers don't know those individuals and lump them into our "hive mind" concept, as mistakenly assume that people's minds have changed.
In practice, it's pretty lame that they've had voice calling for almost two years, and this has never been available in Firefox. We're not talking about old IE here. A basic implementation of voice only calling is not hard to do.
We only get clear explanations from a company's engineers after a discussion is raised.
> In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?
I look forward to a post on https://slack.engineering detailing the challenges. I'm not demanding a response, it's just a wish.
My decision to use a product takes certain principles into account; Slack is the kind of product that is often chosen for you by your company/open source project/community. A bit of "entitlement" — not meant as scare quotes, I just don't share the viewpoint – makes sense here, because sometimes you can't just choose not to use it.
The error message say "Please switch to chrome"
It is clumsy. They probably ment to say: use Chrome for voice support.
Anyway: if it is entitlement to choose your own browser? Then I say: "switch to Internet Explorer 6"...
What on earth are they doing with that money. Building web-based chat apps should not be that capital intensive
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/slack-is-raising-a-250-mil...
Also, while people may feel frustrated about Firefox, I bet they have data showing that users are willing to switch to Chrome for Slack chat or calls when push comes to shove. Otherwise, you bet they would have prioritized this. Data driven development is all about making these kind of tradeoffs.
The main point which I am making is that better user experience trumps everything. As we have seen time and again, once users love your product money will get figured out.
This is starkly different from your opinion above where all you care about is money and why ff doesn't fit into that narrative. Strong companies don't operate or think like that.
To get things back on track, Slack feels that supporting video chat for FF is not the most profitable thing it could do with its money factoring in the profit derived from the improved UX. This is different than "they have a quarter of a billion of dollars in investment and they think that's not enough to build voice chat for FF", which is the implication of the post to which I originally responded. Slack's purpose is to make money, not to "build as many video chat apps for as many platforms as possible"--modulo corruption or incompetence, it will only build clients for new platforms if the opportunity value is higher than the value of other opportunities.
Now, if you think that Slack's assessment is wrong and building a FF video chat app is the most profitable thing they could possibly do with their investment, then that's another conversation. I'm going to assume the people who operate the business, who have troves of information about the company and its opportunities, and who are deeply invested in its success are many times more likely than you or I (random Internet strangers) to know where the best opportunities lie, but that's still a separate conversation.
Salesofrce does this too fwiw.
Given this: Why would more money scale, when people - presumably the thing the money would pay for - has already been shown not to scale?
With much less than a quarter billion dollars you could spin off new companies, "Slack Calls For Firefox Inc." and "Slack Calls For Edge Inc." each with it's own development team dedicated to supporting a given browser, and still not break the bank.
It's just a business choice. It's not they can't, do just don't feel it's worth it.
the screwy part is that effective upper manager needs to have a deep and intuitive notion about software development organizations in order to be able to evaluate statements coming out of software effectively. but thats alot to ask, so they hire a vp eng with a nice sounding resume. that person turns out to not be very effective, and they translate their lack of discernment into a tier of equally useless middle managers. and if by accident a effective engineer gets hired they are completely unable to change things for the better because all the useless padding drowns out their voice.
everyone big company says that they have the resources of a big company but the tactical flexibility and empowerment of a small one. imagine what would you could accomplish were that to be true.
edit What I mean is Slack ruined screenhero, which was amazing before they bought it. Slack's screen sharing is among the worst screen sharing tools I've ever used. It is beyond broken. It uses a massive amount of memory and cpu cycles while being too laggy to use for basic text editing. I actively hate it.
Now, we've literally had to resort to using Teamviewer, because Slack is so bad.
Try search for a conversation with someone in a channel about topic X. You can't do it, because there is no context. Search for the keyword or person? Good luck with that. Even then, if you find it, it just scrolls you to that spot, which is terrible UI.
Ugh.
The UX you describe is one I haven't seen in Slack since very early releases.
https://slackhq.com/threaded-messaging-comes-to-slack-417ffb...
Threaded conversations have been supported for a full year now, you have the ability to specify and narrow your searches down to specific rooms by using "in:#general" or by conversation by using "in:@dave", but a plain search will search as best the application can public rooms, private rooms and private messages, and the application does a great job I think telling you exactly where the search results come from, when they happened along with a contextual view of the conversation that happened before and after the search results-giving you the precise context of what was talked about, and allow you to both jump back in time to the moment the keyword appears, and jump back to "Now" very easily.
https://slackhq.com/next-level-searching-in-slack-1ce56aa8ad...
Again, sorry if this sounds snarky, but I don't think your critiques are really lined up with how Slack has been developed in the last year. Many of your problems have been directly solved.
The fact at that slack has to blog about how to search proves my point, IMO. Gmail doesn't need a post about that. I'm talking about context, which is where search fails, because threads don't work. I can find keywords in slack just fine (which is all the blog post talks about, really). I can't find and save an entire conversation about something important.
:/ I've tried slack and all the shortcuts. It fails as a business tool. Simple email and chatting produces more productivity.
Speak for yourself. Our DevOps uses it extensively, and gets plenty of work done. It's been a great tool, has saved time, decreased ticket response time, and increased follow up. If we didn't have it, we would have to scramble to find something to replace it.
Slack now is a significantly improved tool that we use all the time for everything except large or external video chatting. It's a very nice tool for centralization of alerting, monitoring, etc. We'd find it very hard to move elsewhere as a company.
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"We're afraid our first response may have come off a little more limiting that we meant it — we're focusing on Chrome for our calls support specifically, but that does not mean we have no plans to expand to other browsers in the future!"
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"Apologies — our initial tweet wasn't as clear as it could have been. We didn't mean to imply that future support for other browsers is off the cards, just that it's not on the cards right now."
If something is not on the cards RIGHT NOW then it doesn't mean "we released this feature on Chrome first and the rest is following", it means "we don't believe in cross browser support (=diversity) unless enough people scream loud enough". A very web damaging attitude in my opinion.
Every piece of advice about how to build products gives this exact advice. Why is it not applicable to Slack? Because of their funding amounts?
Again, this is a genuine question, why is the case of slack different than any other company?
I still have my irssi in a tmux terminal when I need it, but it's not a UI I can push over to my teammate (not mentioning the lack of voice call).
Slack somehow did a great job at solving "something", I'm not sure if it was the lack of communication or something else. Sadly, it's taking more and more RAM and stance like not supporting non Chrome makes me even less comfortable using it.
What about IRCCloud?
Thinking about it, screensharing is becoming more and more important too. We still use teamviewer, I didn't want to move to slack built in screen sharing in fear of vendor lock-in (we had teamviewer for so long, if we move out, I'd like something a bit more open).
"...and that is trivial to set-up and use for most people".
Advocating IRC over Slack is analogous to arguing we should be using Gopher instead of WWW because of ActiveX.
If you need to paraphrase a title to make it fit, or change it because the original was misleading or linkbait (as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks), do it by finding the most representative language in the text itself.
I am not sure if this is a problem with Slack's attitude or if it's that the overhead for creating a voice/video chat app in browsers besides Chrome is much more substantial...
Has anyone tried to implement a web based video chat in Firefox before? Is it really that challenging?
One important reason is that there's a lot of innovation that happens outside of Blink that will not happen inside Blink. Blink shows no sign of permitting Rust components such as the parallel restyling engine that Gecko uses.
Another issue is that Blink is not designed to be embeddable in other browsers like Safari. The friction of having to maintain multiple "ports" in one codebase was much of the reason for the WebKit/Blink fork to begin with.
That there's a browser as good as the current Firefox is another reason to not lock ourselves into a Blink monoculture.
Of course, even if FF was in a bad state we should try to avoid de-facto standardization of Chrome, but with FF improving with each version, there's a practical, sellable argument for diversity.
Why are we regressing back to the horrible world of vendor lock in and single browser sites. Chrome is the new IE6?
They are not saying they can’t afford it. Money they have, engineering talent tends to be always on short supply. You need to think where you put the effort.
NOTE: I posted this comment before the title was corrected by the mods for editorializing.