Ask HN: Does Slack work better in the browser?

3 points·robinhood··3 comments

While impressive product wise, Slack is still slow as a dedicated Mac app, especially when Teams also run and someone shares her screen.

Would it be better (both CPU and ram usage) if Slack was opened in the browser instead (preferably Firefox)?

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I use Slack exclusively in the browser. Not so much to address CPU and memory usage. Instead it is because I find Slack's loading behavior extremely irritating when using the desktop client. When I quit using the desktop app it was because it stole the window context twice while it loaded and was extremely slow to load. This meant if I opened slack it stole my window context and then again once I was already in the middle of doing something else in another window while I waited for it to load. The last time I used the desktop client was three years ago. Maybe that has changed since but I am not interested in giving it another chance.

I will say that Slack imposes some seemingly arbitrary restrictions on what you can do with the browser client. Calling is only available in Chrome, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me since both Google Meet and Zoom work fine in Firefox. I find all to be resource intensive during calls with video, but Zoom is by far the worst.

I've been a long-time in-browser slack user and yesterday Firefox refused to open any slack link, bookmark, or history entry I had. Closing all my tabs and relaunching FF did not help either.

In a pinch I installed the desktop app, and once I had a little bit of spare time I googled around and figured out the issue. Which was that Slack had used 2GB of Cookies/Site Data and Firefox neglected to notify me of that and that appears to be a hard limit and prevent Slack from loading. Clearing the data resolved the issue.

I bought the M1 Macbook Air to fix a slow Slack problem.

It appears to have worked.

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