Hacker News Reader

Comment by geodel | Hacker News Reader

> and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed.

I agree. There is no law against half-assed, bloated Electron based desktop software that can bring even recent hardware to its knees.

View on HN

A chat client that takes multiple hundreds of MBs of RAM and sucks battery life prodigiously should be, if not illegal, at the very least a violation of unwritten international norms.

It's actually not the first to do this. Adium (AIM) and Colloquy (IRC) switched to WebKit theming in the 2000s, when computers were /really/ too slow to run it.

Oh wow. Now that should be illegal.

I've never experienced this very common criticism of slack on here. When I occasionally check, Slack is using around 500mb or RAM. A lot for a chat app? Sure. But it has little to no affect on either my 16gb or 8gb machines.

RAM alone isn’t the problem. The issue is that is so laggy and slow. Poor algorithms on 500mb of bad data structures can bring any modern machine to its knees.

I'm usually at 500mb... per workspace. And the loading times when switching workspaces / channels are just stupid.

Ended deleting the desktop client.

It's 500MB RAM per tab/login/workspace (whatever it's called).

Office/company slack, project A slack, project B slack, ... and in no time slack starts to use more RAM than docker/VMs I am developing on.

Slack is using 89mb here. I never notice it running, personally.

Just reloaded the Slack tab in Firefox to clear down 1GB of RAM use.

As I do every day.

Every single day.

For the one single channel I join. with no PMs and no threads, no file transfers, no voice or video anything.

Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if it was astonishingly good. But it isn't. It isn't even basically competent, it's terrible. Terrible at scrolling back, terrible at editing previous lines, appalling at completing names properly, bad at search, and completely lacking at customizing when it displays 2MB animated gifs inline.

I would expect a 4Gb machine would mean I never have to check on a text chat client. Apparently not.

Why does anyone use the app instead of the site?

The site also is a heavy resource hog but you're right that it's overall less.

There are plenty of lightweight clients that use the Slack API. I don't see why people complain so hard that the official client is heavy.

Weechat with Slack is a dream feels like the good-ole IRC days.

The site doesn’t use any resources when I close its tab.

The desktop app doesn't use any resources when you close it either. What's your point?

That’s only true if you configure it in a particular way. By default it stays running when closed so it can notify you and update its badge.

For me it’s a usability thing—I tend to lose track of SPA tabs, often by closing the window or not being able to differentiate them from content tabs. I do use web apps but I vastly prefer using my machine’s window manager and window buttons/lists.

I use a tool like applicationize (https://applicationize.me/) to make a chrome app for a site. It mimicks an app, but is running as a tab in chrome. Saves memory but gives the benefit of separate window and workspace management (I can tab to it, it can have icon etc).

Can't make calls through the site with Firefox

I personally use a 3rd party client which uses actually native code rather than electron https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

Using lots of browser tabs instead of applications appears to me to be a step backward in usability. Instead of relying on the window manager to organise your work, you add cognitive load instead.

Eh, you can just put Slack into it's own window if you're going to use multiple tabs for it. Personally, I just pin it next to my email and it works fine.

I'm not a fan of how much RAM or CPU it uses. I tried the desktop app hoping it would be better, but it seems like it's perhaps worse (I use Firefox, so

Not great for web developers. We have enough tabs open and if every window is a chrome icon it’s a pain to find stuff. I’ve got karma tests running, selenium tests, incognito windows testing security etc etc.

If the other poster has the tan pinned then it is probably very easy to find. Perhaps even command-2 if it’s pinned in the second tab from the left.

Not a great solution if your window manager groups application windows together (e.g. gnome shell and osx).

> Why does anyone use the app instead of the site?

Because on Android at least the website detects that you're on a mobile device and switches to read-only mode. Correct, you can't even post a reply without fudging user-agent or installing the app.

Isn't the Slack app on Android native?

Why would I hide my chatrooms in several browser tabs? Sounds maddening.

Slack is the only reason I used pinned tabs, FWIW.

As a web developer I’m often using my browser as a guinea pig. Hell a selenium test shut the whole shit down and hijacked it today. I’m not going to run slack in the browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com