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Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Wow. You realize they share most of the same code, and are essentially feature identical?

Seriously, open the desktop app, then open the web app. They're identical. Precisely because they chose to use a toolkit that let them easily handle cross platform issues with UI in a sane and repeatable manner.

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> You realize they share most of the same code, and are essentially feature identical?

Yes. So why would I run essentially a second web browser instance to run the same code in a different place?

Beyond that, I had with weird screen refresh issues with the desktop app, where scrolling or even just typing in the text box would cause parts of the main HTML view to just disappear to the point where it'd be unusable. Often images wouldn't load, or would load, but then have the same disappearing issue. Restarting or refreshing the UI wouldn't help. I'd have to restart the app every couple days anyway due to ballooning memory usage. Hell, even the font rendering was weird and didn't match what I'd see by opening a regular Chrome window. I reported the issues to Slack, but never heard back, and after waiting through several releases for a fix, over a period of months, I gave up.

> ... let them use a toolkit that let them easily handle cross platform issues with UI in a sane and repeatable manner.

That's not what I want. I want apps that fit in with my desktop, not apps that look the same across OSes, ignoring platform idioms and style/placement standards.

I wish Chrome apps for the desktop were more popular. Use the browser you're using anyways but on a thing that sort of acts like an application.

I installed the Netflix chrome app on my Windows PC. It's basically the Netflix webpage on a separate application window that doesn't have tabs or a search bar.

Chrome apps on desktops are dead.

https://blog.chromium.org/2016/08/from-chrome-apps-to-web.ht...

Yes, that's the problem. Web apps are never going to have the level of system integration that you'd expect with a native desktop app. Why install a 'native app' that offers you the subpar web experience when you could just open it in your browser?

The difference is that electron is crap.

A single Gitter tab uses 20MB RAM. I'm sure it would use at least 250MB for the same functionality if I used the electron version.

This is such an obvious problem. Why haven't they fixed it already by trimming down the web browser?

If that's the case, then the desktop app buys you absolutely nothing over just using the webapp. In fact, now you have to have multiple instances of your browser running, instead of just one.

Exactly, it doesn't have any business being a fake desktop app, just because the devs don't want to learn native frameworks nor how to write portable web applications.

if they are identical, why would i choose to open up a bundled web browser when the one i already have opened works just fine and can display the web page just as well?

The Electron and browser Slack apps are not /exactly/ the same on Windows. The Electron version of Slack swaps out the normal titlebar for a black bar and a hamburger menu. The point of a native app is to integrate with the native window manager, but Slack overrides the native styling. (Spotify does the same thing.) The browser version, by virtue of running in the web browser, is consistent with the rest of the system UI.

The desktop app was using 4GB of ram on my workstation (Centos 7), so I stopped using it.

See, for a website, that's fine. But not for an application. Why would I not want an application that fits in well with my chosen OS, and follows the design guidelines and patterns of that OS?

Except electron is a lot more resource heavy than one tab in a browser.

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