If I were slack I would immediately stop whatever nonsense re-design they are probably doing and redirect all resources to getting their system stable. Who cares about where my messages are being reorganized to when the damn chat doesn't even work?
Sorry, couldn't resist making the joke.
If the new design was clearly superior, fine, but then if it was clearly superior, they wouldn't do it again a few months down the road.
Maybe then Slack could also put resources into creating native apps. Electron supposedly streamlines development and allows teams to move quickly—but I'd rather they move slowly and make performant software.
I sometimes use lower-end machines to test stuff, like a 2011 Macbook Air with 4GB of memory. There, I have all manner of problems—the fans spin up, and the whole Slack interface becomes extremely slow to respond. Simple things like changing channels and loading threads take seconds at a time.
These computers are inherently slower by modern standards, but there’s simply no reason Slack should require so many system resources!
I've made multiple support complaints to slack about their memory usage, there's been times where it's been using Gigabytes of memory on my workstation, and I've actually had to kill slack to compile on more than one occasion.
So not an electron issue, an engineering issue. That's I think at the root of all these "electron is bad" comments... poorly engineered code is slow. It will be slow if it's C++ or JS or Perl. But well engineered code is fast. And it can be fast in C++ or JS or Perl.
As an example, I've been playing with web frameworks recently. Asp.net running on dotnet core is roughly 10 times faster than node running express. While well engineered js might not get much slower, you'll never close that gap.
It's still a hog of course, but it's broadly better.
How is a multi-billion dollar company incapable of implementing a web chat in a competent way?
That's entirely possible, but this problem has persisted throughout multiple versions of Firefox and Fedora. For all I know, it could be due to the VPN connection, but even then, the VPN connection isn't that slow. Zoom video conferences still work reasonably well over it.
Any app in which I can type faster than the characters appear has deeper issues than scaling.
No it’s a centralized SaaS IM/chat platform with a very slow web client and no native clients, because it’s not a standardised internet protocol surrounded by a healthy ecosystem.
All of that and they don't have Enterprise contracts with SLAs!
(I'm talking about Discord)
Here's some data to back it up:
Slack's uptime is 99.95% from August to October[1]
Discord's uptime is 99.85% from August to October[2]
[1] https://status.slack.com/calendar [2] https://discordstatus.com/uptime?page=1
In the last 3 months our team has had to (against company policy) fall back to Discord to be able to do our daily meetings about 6 or 7 times.
I wouldn't run Discord on a large company either, but not for stability's sake, but because their (free) screen sharing is possibly the worst if you want to share a desktop rather than a game (it is very much optimized for low delay, and the downscaling makes text unreadable).