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Comment by SECProto | Hacker News Reader

> Which software exactly is functionally the same yet consumes more resources? Can you give some specific examples?

From this end user's perspective, Google Chat is functionally no different than ICQ or MSN Messenger were 20 years ago. Notifications show up on my phone screen instead of my windows 95 screen. And now we call them emojis and there are more of them. And Google chat has more lag (~1400ms) when I open a chat window from my contacts list. All while the functionality of getting some text from myself to my friends has stayed identical (actually decreased - I can't use custom fonts/bold/etc on the modern version)

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Datapoint: I've recently spun up my mom's old G4 Powerbook 12" (running OS X 10.5 Leopard) to rip some old CDs I found, and everything was reasonably snappy. Well, ok, a bit slow, but fine, really. Until I opened Safari. After some 3 or 4 tabs the machine basically ground to a halt. (Fair enough: 256 MB RAM and a spinning hard disk!)

Things got a bit better when I switched off JavaScript. But yeah. The web is basically unusable on older machines. For many use cases all I want is some text, maybe some images, maybe some forms and buttons. How hard can it be to render that?

Is Google chat using more resources and draining perf? The UX of a chat app is somewhat of a straw man here. None of the chat apps you mentioned “can barely fit in a single machine” or “destroys performance”.

ahem slack?

But realistically Google chat uses more ram than the PC I used MSN messenger on even HAD.

And msn was “hoggish” for the time.

Slack is vastly more functionality than MSN messenger.

How do you know the RAM usage of gchat? I agree Chrome uses more (and again it’s a completely different ballgame than it used to be) than but where are you getting the chat specific app metrics?

> Slack is vastly more functionality than MSN messenger.

I don't buy that. Because you can attach bots? or make calls, custom emoji? (you can do all of these on MSN) and more (like theme customisations and font changes!)

> How do you know the RAM usage of gchat?

You can see each tab's memory usage with Safari on MacOS as it's tied into the Activity Monitor.

Google Cloud Console uses 989MB for me, for instance.

> Because you can attach bots? or make calls, custom emoji?

And to add on to that - these features shouldn't have any noticeable resource consumption of the kind people are complaining about. Bots shouldn't affect performance at all. The ability to make calls should have no performance impact when a call is not being made. People aren't complaining about Slack with a call being slow - they're complaining about Slack taking a long time to start up, and Slack using lots of memory and CPU just sitting there doing nothing.

> You can see each tab's memory usage with Safari on MacOS as it's tied into the Activity Monitor.

That's not necessarily a good proxy. Safari, like Chrome and Firefox over-allocate far more than they need speculatively for caching & rendering purposes. There was a whole blog post on HN that completely bungled memory metrics when looking at the integrated Activity Monitor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179817

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