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Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

I can’t think of any reason not to use Slack exclusively as a website. I’ve been doing it for years now, and it’s a better experience IMO. For Teams, the only disadvantage is you can’t share your screen and video simultaneously when running as a tab; but I find the screen sharing experience to be better otherwise when running as a browser tab.

Also: all of these “shitty” Electron apps work just as well on Linux as they do everywhere else. That is a huge advantage. I’ve got a significant amount of software that is realistically only on Linux because of electron.

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Ii run Slack outside of a tab and in its app format because it's easier to navigate to using keyboard shortcuts and OS level features. That may not be enough for you, but it's plenty reason for me, and I imagine many others.

Slack in browser tab user here. Got sick of the app and how slow it was pretty fast. It's just not worth it.

Not a Slack user here. Is the app version _slower_ than the website? I assumed that since Electron is only a little bit more than a Chromium wrapper that they would have identical performance.

Long time slack app user here, I don’t know how you guys organize your slack but performance has never been an issue for our organization, I don’t think it would run any better then it currently does if it were an os native app, of course my machine isn’t a toaster.

It's not just the app being slower than the website, it's what it does to the rest of your machine.

Contained within a tab Slack can only use a set amount of resources allotted by the browser.

Whereas installing the app means it can go full hog.

One Chromium runtime managing five tabs is more efficient than five Chromium runtimes running one site each (because those instances aren't able to share anything with one another).

Isn't the native app just the Electron code repackaged for native, and not a true ground-up native app at all?

If the code is based on HTML/js/CSS and not Swift/Obj-C/C++ (etc) then you're really creating a web app running in a native microbrowser.

Which is very much not the same thing as writing OS and system calls directly - not least because it will be much slower.

With Chrome or Edge, you can take any web page and turn it into a standalone "app" that lives in the start menu and can be pinned to the taskbar and Alt-Tabbed to, etc.

In the Chrome menu, select More Tools / Create Shortcut... and edit the title and check the Open as Window box.

In Edge, select Apps / Install this site as an app. Edge has a lot more options here than Chrome. You can pin it to the Taskbar or Start, create a desktop shortcut, and set it to auto-start. (You can do those manually with a Chrome shortcut if you know your way around the Start menu and Startup folder, but it's easier in Edge.)

I don't see a similar option in Firefox. No idea about Safari. If anyone knows about those browsers, please comment.

And having posted this comment, I am now wondering why I am still running the Slack app. I think I will try making it an Edge app!

I don't understand. What benefit does this have over running the app?

It ensures that when a website crash your browser or grinds everything to a halt, then it will take down the other “apps” as well.

That one of the reasons I don’t use the Google Chats PWA , when the browser misbehave, it will affact PWAs as well.

Some people in the thread said they preferred running Slack in a browser tab instead of the Electron app, perhaps to avoid the memory overhead of a separate browser instance.

The comment I replied to described a preference for the app because of OS navigation, e.g. Alt+Tab, a separate taskbar icon, etc.

This Chrome shortcut or Edge app trick lets you combine these approaches, running the website in your browser but giving the site its own main window that you can pin to the taskbar, set to auto-run, and navigate to like a native app.

I would have guessed the memory consumption would be similar given the sandboxed tab model of Chrome. Anyway... even if not, do any of you guys really find that the memory consumption of Slack is a problem for you in practice?

Lots of tools are better as websites - however underhand motives often mean mobile apps get pushed more and have done for years. Inevitably someone pops up to say "but what about essential feature X that you can't do well on the web" even though it's rarely genuinely essential or it's a worthwhile trade-off.

My GP surgery uses a fantastic website for streamlining comms where you'd never want to install an app that would be rarely used. It's so well integrated that they could ping me the link during a call and I had details back to them seconds later so I got a decision there and then as we spoke rather than breaking flow state and delaying it by days as they used to.

Funnily enough my dentist has a similar kind of app relating to pre-appt preparation - perhaps there's a fight back for common sense in these slightly more serious fields?

Yes I have felt this before.

There are plenty of native mobile apps out there that are better off as web apps.

If it's a service that people use constantly, then there may be some merits in using an app.

But more often that not there are plenty of things people use once-in-a-long-while that should probably be just a website.

For instance I know a place (outside the US, not naming the place because that's not relevant) that has a mobile app just to highlight the local tourist spots. It just shows pictures and text description. There's no AR/VR stuff or anything. Neither can it reserve tickets for any of those places. In my opinion that should just have been a static website!

I have to use it constantly and it's easy to lose a tab compared to a standalone app, plus notifications. Reason enough for me.

>For Teams, the only disadvantage is you can’t share your screen and video simultaneously when running as a tab; but I find the screen sharing experience to be better otherwise when running as a browser tab.

did they fix multi-stream video yet? last time I checked in the browser version you could only see one video stream (ie. webcam), whereas on the desktop app you could see multiple.

Last I used it I could see multiple people simultaneously. I could even do Together Mode, but it seemed to be rendered on a server somewhere and streamed, rather than done locally. Maybe they were doing that with webcams and I just didn’t notice.

The main reason I was using the browser was so I could use Stylus to make it compact just like Slack. That’s another benefit of the browser approach, but ideally it would not be so obviously inferior to competitors.

I disagree, Teams in Linux (it might be on purpose) the app is way cut out, you can't request control (or was a few months ago), you can see less simultaneous videos at the same time (iirc was 2 or 4), so no, with the app you have almost zero advantages in Linux over the browser version.

I use Discord in a browser tab. Much better than the app. Loads instantly and reuses the one instance of Chromium I'm always running anyway.

Maybe desktop Linux should get its act together to make a target that everyone else actually feels like targeting instead of grasping to the relevance of someone dropping Electron bombs as the true path to happiness, or emulating Windows games for that matter.

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