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Comment by 0xDEEPFAC | Hacker News Reader

When everything is chromium there is no competitive advantage for any of these chat applications. For example, before, Skype used to be based on the Qt framework and it used less resources and actually had more features - like universal push-to-talk and better integration into the OS.

Welcome to the future - lets Javascript all the things... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SCfNhyIo_U

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> used less resources and actually had more features

I remember the time when there was a native client for Skype on Linux. It probably used less resources, yes, but it was horribly lacking in features compared to Windows or MacOS native clients. Now that everything is javascript, Skype on Linux works great, apart from being a godawful resource hog. I found it really pleasant to use over the last several years. Video calls work great, screen sharing works great, even conference calls work, which they never before did on Linux. Couldn't be happier with the changes.

So why did they force everyone else to use the Javascript version instead of only Linux? Why didn't they just improve the Linux version.

I use Skype everyday for work and my quality of life is noticeably different in a bad way :(

Plus, my poor laptop is now forced to run Skype, Zoom, Slack, Google Docs, and Discord. Its turned into a cooktop...

> Why didn't they just improve the Linux version.

You know, write once, run everywhere. It's programmer's dream :-)

The funny thing here is that this is no small startup with limited resources.

Microsoft can have dedicated teams for each platform (perhaps Linux is not as important but certainly for Windows, macOS, android and iOS)

It might also be an issue with motivation. Would you want to work on something that's basically a clone, so there's no creativity but purely porting + solving annoying platform-related bugs? You'd probably tolerate it for a bit, but then it's just playing catch up all the time. It seems like a recipe for employees trying to switch away to another team or company.

They did it for control and convenience at the expense of literate computer users.

The Windows 10 UI is written in TypeScript, Edge is chrome, Chrome is chrome, Safari is chrome - it makes hiring and training easy when you can just make every API a grey gelatinous chunk of ECMA script with hamburger menus. It also means the "app" is always sandboxed unable to do powerful things like universal push-to-talk.

The color and joy of using programs has been flattened out in the name of consistency.

Oh yeah but I was talking about motivating the developers. I think it might be challenging to hire people who just work on porting.

Write once, run poorly everywhere. It's a lazy programmer's dream ; )

https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32

It really has to be laziness since the Qt framework is widely supported on Linux.

What I liked best about the old Linux Skype client, was that it would let me edit messages after sending. But not only mine, everyone's!! My friends were sooo annoyed. Good times where had!

^ This. Skype as an app was downgraded, features gone never to return. I know nobody in MS uses it, because otherwise they d know of its glaring bugs

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