The tweet mentioned in the article, saying:
Electron app memory usage: 150MB
Native app memory usage: 0 MB (because you never ship it)
really hit home for me.
Electron app memory usage: 150MB
Native app memory usage: 0 MB (because you never ship it)
really hit home for me.
Of course it does not apply to everything, some apps do need every last clock cycle of speed, but so far none of mine had.
For comparison, the Playstation 3 has 256MB of system RAM, and manages to run GTA V.
[0] See the Ripcord application, discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23163960
Slack has, to put it mildly, plenty of money, and gave us a 300MB bloated client. Ripcord is a payware alternative client made by a single developer.
Things seem to be precisely backward.
So does the Mac I'm using.
Slack is taking less than 1% of my Ram.
PS3 was released 13 YEARS ago.
At the time AIM was the dominant chat client, and it probably took more like 5% of RAM available.
That's why I used it for my example. Past systems are a useful benchmark for what it's practical to do with a certain level of computational horsepower.
> Slack is taking less than 1% of my Ram.
My system has 8GB, so 3.7%. I'd rather have 3.4% of my memory back.
More broadly, we should consider that we may run many bloated apps. Even if Slack doesn't do too much harm on its own, if all your desktop apps are using 10x the resources they could be using, it adds up to you spending more on hardware than you should have to.
You paid for that 16GB of RAM. That should let you do a lot more than old computers can, rather than doing the same things we did 15 years ago with bloated software.
> At the time AIM was the dominant chat client, and it probably took more like 5% of RAM available.
Right, like Ripcord, it did roughly the same thing Slack/Teams do, using far fewer resources.
Is the bottleneck in your system actually ram usage? Because I think implicit in your view is that you have a better usage for that ram. If so, what?
Because I really struggle coming up with more than about 5 electron apps I might ever run at any given time (Slack, VSCode, Discord, maaaybe Etcher..., and I'm basically out of ideas). Even then, two of those apps are both chat apps and I probably shouldn't have Discord open for work, and I don't use slack for any personal reason.
Basically - Electron apps are all applications that are UI heavy. I don't have the mental power to manage more than about 5 open and active UI apps before I'm the bottleneck, not the computer.
So at 5, you're spending 15-18% of your RAM on 5, 5! apps that you want to be interacting with rich GUIs at any given time. I just don't see it.
At least for my use cases, electron apps almost always make up a trivial amount of my total ram usage. Docker/Development Env/Vms DOMINATE in comparison.
So while I get that it could be faster, the reality of the situation is that without electron, none of the apps I listed would work on Linux at all. Instead they all do by default.
So right now on amazon, 16gb of ram is 53 bucks for a decent module. 150/16000 = .009. So basically - I paid 49 cents, and got apps that work by default on my platform of choice. That's pretty fucking amazing compared to old platform specific apps.
Sure, people could spend more money to mostly sidestep the issue (supposing they didn't have any workloads which actually benefited from all available RAM), but that doesn't make it a non-issue.
I think there are some UI niceties to the 'app' version but it's essentially the same.
Teams refers to Microsoft's competing product. Like Slack, its desktop app is really just the web version.
I would expect that a pinned Slack tab in Chrome/Edge would be able to share some resources with the browser that a separate Slack app can't.
Has anybody tested the performance difference between running 100 browser tabs vs. running the same webapps as 100 electron processes?
Is there a mobile app? Nope! Dead on arrival. In 2020, Slack or Teams or anything similar is literally useless without a mobile app.
Feature matrix says animated emojis will arrive "never." lol!
I remember the days of native chat clients like Skype and AIM. I remember how Linux and Mac platforms were basically half-clients compared to Windows. It sucked.
Electron applications like Slack and Spotify work everywhere, exactly the same. And if you think about it, that's why something like chat and music apps would prioritize ease of cross-platform deployment over perfect efficiency. They're not particularly demanding, and they are most valuable to people when they're ubiquitous. If Spotify isn't in every device I own it loses a great amount of value.
Nobody's sitting at their Activity Monitor staring at the RAM usage of Slack or Teams. In reality, performance is fine. It's just chat.
(Interestingly enough, I've never found a music application that skips tracks more quickly than Spotify, even for locally-stored music. It's just instant with no gaps.)
Yes, because they're just web pages. Then why not just use the browser to display them?
That said I can think of some pretty good reasons.
- Users don’t understand it as well or are less comfortable with it.
- Users’ general preference for logical separation
- Mobile safari doesn’t support browser notifications.
- You won’t get browser notifications if you close the tab by accident
- You lose OS integration, like replying via OS notifications in Slack or using OS Music controls with Spotify
On top of all that a browser tab uses plenty of RAM as well so I don’t really see the upside of using the browser for these apps, either.
However, it might also make it harder to find bugs and it will produce bloat with real, noticeable consequences - e.g. increased RAM, CPU and disk usage, more sluggish UI behavior, etc - except, those effects will happen on the user's machine, not the developer's, so a developer might be tempted to ignore them.
I cloned a 165mb Electron app in Sciter, and it was only 6mb: