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Comment by me551ah | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with Slack for me is how slow it is. I have been using chat apps for a couple of decades now, starting from mIRC to IM chat applications. And slack is by far the slowest chat product that I have ever used. Takes a few seconds to startup, takes GBs of ram just so that I can send chat messages and the interface just isn't snappy. Earlier I would keep chat apps open in my system tray all the time since they were so lightweight and barely consumed any resources, but every now and then I need to shut slack down if I'm running out of memory.

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Exactly. Just 30 minutes ago I observed delays between me typing text and the text appearing in Slack's text input box. With my bare eyes on an idle system with 32GB RAM and a quad-core i7-6700! It isn't even rare. That's just absurd.

Back around 2012 I would have Empathy (XMPP) always on and I would use GNOME's wonderful "reply in notification" UI to talk to people. It felt snappy and its resource use wasn't noticeable on a laptop with 4GB RAM and a dual-core CPU. Modern chat apps are crap.

Desktop Slack apps are based on Electron and just so you’ll get a sense of the bloat of it - all Electron apps have bundled in drivers for Xbox 360 controllers.

Is that really true? that sounds too absurd to be true.

I found this: https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/ which is post dated 2018, I'm sure it has to be configurable by now.

I'd recommend Ripcord [1] as a blazingly fast native app that can talk on Slack and Discord while taking a max of ~50-100MB of memory at any given time, even with lots of connections/channels open.

[1] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

I tried ripcord and enjoy the idea of it, but I can't replace my slack workflow because ripcord does not have slacks keyboard integrations.

What ends up happening is I try to leave ripcord open and then every time there is more than just basic use of slack, I have to open up the original electron client to post pictures or polls or similar.

Agreed. Speed is only half the problem with Slack. The other half is lack of integration with the system it's running on. Ripcord doesn't do any better than Slack at this, and in many cases does worse.

Yeah, I agree that's an issue. It's funny though because even if I'm running Slack in my browser, if someone posts a picture, it shows a thumbnail and you have to click on it and open it in a new window. It's such a horrible workflow. Ripcord makes that even slightly worse because if I click on an image in Ripcord, it launches my browser and I have to log in to Slack, navigate to the channel with the image, click on the image to open a new window... etc.

Given that Slack doesn't work remotely, I also have to ask, do they actually use their product? Because I can't imagine someone who can change the product putting up with the ridiculous workflows that Slack forces on you.

Yep - this is why I only use Slack via my browser.

Also means that I never have to see the unread message notification if there's no icon for the Slack app in my Dock or Cmd + Tab.

No other notifications enabled. I tab over to Slack when I'm in a time and space that I can respond to questions.

Does that reduce the ram footprint and the slowness of the thing, or does it just mean the task manager/system resource monitor files it under "Firefox" instead of "Slack"?

(I write and dislike web apps since I tend to lose them. Having dedicated windows which don't host all the links I click on to documents is much more conducive to my organisation style. Actually, I would go so far as to say that I wish web browsers would still let you turn tabs off.)

It should be less memory because you are not running an entire other instance/version of chromium.

You can pin tabs in Firefox. Little harder to lose them that way.

For me, its not about the resource consumption of my computer, its about my personal resource consumption. Keeping it away from my taskbar (on an entirely different workspace, in fact) helps keep it from being an excessive interrupter.

Also they go out of their way to make it slower, add more buttons that make you take more clicks, and just use up useful real estate with buttons that nobody ever uses.

The entire UX for slack is just getting more cumbersome to the point where they added a lightning bolt so they dont have to think about all the crap they are shoveling in their program, and now the useful stuff is not available except beyond this lightning bolt.

When native apps start running into this problem, they allow you to customize defaults, but slack just wants to be the worst of both worlds imo.

How does it compare to signal? Whenever I load signal on desktop it can take 30-60 seconds because it loads hundreds of messages from the phone into the desktop app. It used to be terrible on my older computer, it would take 5 minutes to open signal there.

If you had to use Cisco WebEx you wouldn't complain about slack. I've had messages take three minutes to reach the recipient. In order wrong the.

Very confusing and frustrating.

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