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Comment by jug | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's because it's shipping with an entire web browser. Although I agree with others here this is only part of the problems with MS Teams. It's not a very fun application to use, honestly. Everything is sluggish and many UI decisions are not great.

But at least the performance should get better some day. Microsoft has now made the "personal" edition of Teams that is shipping with Windows 11 into one that instead of shipping a browser, uses Edge as a renderer (WebView2). Since that's probably already cached in RAM anyway, it launches near instantly and consumes much less RAM than the clunky edition that doesn't share resources with anything else.

However, MS Teams for Business still does not exist in such an edition although I assume they are working on it.

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"It's slow because it's Electron" is a lousy excuse: Discord is an Electron app with more or less the same purpose and it's perfectly snappy. Hell, Microsoft's own VSCode is considered the gold standard of how to do Electron apps well. It's fast as shit, assuming you're not opening huge files. It baffles me that the Teams org isn't begging the VSCode org for some of their performance mojo.

Discord's slow and heavy and glitches or crashes constantly. My group of friends landed on it for some activities over the pandemic, because most of the other options were on-balance worse for what we needed, but it's heavy and not high-quality.

... Ok I have to know what else is running on your PC because aside from needing to kick it once or twice when there was a major outage to get back in, it's been smooth.

Not just me, all ~8 of us using it. Mac and Windows both. Every single session (2-3 hours, usually) at least one person's client simply crashes. [EDIT] more typically, it's like one crash every 30-45 minutes, but I don't think we've ever made it through without at least one crash.

[EDIT AGAIN] I'd guesstimate its person-hour-of-use crash rate at at least 20x that of Slack, from what I've seen. Maybe quite a bit higher.

Chat needs like 100mb tops to function...discord comes in im the half gig range that serious AAA games used to fall into 10 years ago, nevermind the abominable snowman Teams...

Once you run more than one chat in Discord even on recent PCs you see the suck.

Not everyone has a Core i7 made two years ago. Discord takes 10 seconds to start up on my unloaded Core i5-6200u and a full 30 seconds when I'm playing a video game. Mumble, which is not written in Electron, starts up in 2-4 seconds while playing a game.

I wouldn't call Discord snappy, not even close, Telegram is way snappier for example... But Teams is certainly on another league (for the worse).

VSCode isn't that snappy either but it's decent enough. If every Electron app was like that "It's slow because it's Electron" wouldn't be such a meme.

VSCode is clunky but almost usable. I like that it's multiplatform, free, and relatively capable, but I dislike its clunky and very non-snappy user experience.

VSCode really needs better competition than clunky Java IDEs from the likes of JetBrains or Eclipse or platform-specific native IDEs like Xcode.

Xcode is abysmal, I would honestly feel sorry for Apple devs if not for how much money they make. Last time I used it even autocompletion was broken (it would write the text 1 character ahead).

But yeah there's clearly room for a snappier LSP-based editor, preferably one with a toolbar.

I've been using Xcode every working day for over 12 years and on the whole it has been excellent. It definitely has some quirks but it is a feature rich workhorse.

It has integrated docs, simulators, unit/UI test functionality inc coverage reports, live UI debugging, tons of profiling tools, and I can use it to upload my apps straight to App Store Connect. Starting with XCode 13 I also have built in CI/CD. I can build, profile, test and deploy a whole app on multiple platforms from scratch with it. And its free.

Every release of Xcode has been a buggy mess. Every. Single. One. It certainly has lots of features but I'd much rather it had less features and more polish. The worst sin a tool can make is to be unreliable and that's the best word I can use to describe Xcode.

“Every. Single. One.” There have been some bugs here and there, but it’s really not the mess you’re claiming it to be.

The Apple App Store likes to show reviews that are tied to a country, but at least for the ones I see Xcode sits at a proud 2.6 stars, with hundreds of 1 star reviews complaining about bugs and crashes.

Certainly reflects my experience as well. When the text editor of a development environment doesn't work right, I mean, shouldn't that be job number 1? Search google for "Xcode bugs", you'll see thread after thread of complaints.

I can find major complaints of bugs and crashes going all the way from 9 years ago to the latest Xcode release, no other development environment has this many complaints. It is by far the most buggy and crash prone development environment available today. People _happily_ pay for AppCode for a reason.

You're right, XCode is full of bugs are here AND there.

Ideally it would be here OR there, ie much less of them!

The last few are actually alright but there did seem to a be period where it broke every release and dropped highlighting and completion as sourcekit would crap out. Word is internal apple devs were also annoyed and complaining frequently.

I love Xcode and wish it offered support for more languages.

Hence why people still prefer to use Emacs and Vim.

If you’re talking about Telegram Desktop it’s written in C++ with Qt for the UI, I don’t think it’s even really comparable to Discord in that regard

Discord is snappy? Is this the level of desktop applications in 2022? :P

Super snappy for me (with countless of crowded servers constantly bombarding messages).

Post your specs. Discord takes 10 seconds to start up on my unloaded Core i5-6200u.

The average user does not have a gaming or workstation CPU.

Sadly yes.

And you can blame all the fuckers who ran to Slack and VSCode, for it. Once electron became "acceptable in polite society", it was all over.

Teams, Slack and VSCode all run in the browser too and that's really useful.

Agreed. My main problem with Electron apps is just how slow it loads, even on an M1 Mac (~20 seconds loading time vs the normal 1 second or less). Discord is certainly no exception to it, and even steals focus twice while loading.

Personally I have to quit Discord to keep myself from getting distracted, so it’s way worse when you have to wait so long just to reply to a notification.

You know how far we've fallen when we consider VSCode or Discord desktop apps with good performance

Truth! Delphi had this all sorted out 20 years ago.

VSCode was only praised because it was compared to other Electron apps and Atom. It surely is fast enough. But it isn't best of Native Apps fast. Sublime, Coda, or BBText. And again everything is relative. For those who went through some DOS minimal latency era even the so called fast Native Apps today is barely on par.

That said the bar for different people varied a lot. I am latency sensitive.

I donate to Sublime, even though I hardly use it, because VSCode really needs proper competition to stay in business.

> It's fast as shit

Why does this keep being said about VSCode? Electron has it’s benefits and so does VSCode but it’s in no way fast or “fast as shit” as far as editors and even IDEs go, sorry but it’s slow.

YMMV but I'd never describe vscode as slow. Maybe not fast either, but pretty much normal. I've never noticed much about its speed, which would imply its not blindingly fast or painfully slow, just normal

VSCode is only usable, because in reality many plugins are external processes written in a mix of C++, Go and Rust.

> Microsoft's own VSCode is considered the gold standard of how to do Electron apps well. It's fast as shit, assuming you're not opening huge files.

It takes 10-15 seconds to start up on my work machine. That's not "fast as shit" by any stretch of the imagination.

> But at least the performance should get better some day. Microsoft has now made the "personal" edition of Teams that is shipping with Windows 11 into one that instead of shipping a browser, uses Edge as a renderer (WebView2)

That's not shipping an entire browser. That's shipping an entire bloody OS! (edge is still stupidly deeply integrated, and I'd bet there's still old ie MSHTML gubbins in there for the enterprise crowd to cling to.)

It probably uses Edge WebView2, which is based on Chromium and can be updated on its own.

ZeroTier uses it for its control panel, and installs it on first launch which caused me some confusing as to why i always had to launch it twice to make it appear after a new install.

Roblox's UWP Microsoft Store app, for instance, still uses the old legacy EdgeHTML based webview.

... While I mention Roblox, let me just let it be known that the win32 Roblox app, the one that Roblox pushes, uses an incredibly insecure IE webview. Roblox simply doesn't listen to feedback.

And actually, Microsoft's own MS Store used the UWP webview which is EdgeHTML for a long time until they recently replaced it with a native frontend.

So it will be a lot better because the runtime ( Edge WebView 2 ) is integrated into Windows 11. I see this as lowering memory usage only because I thought Edge is still very much just chromium hence performance will be similar?

And if they ship Webview 2 cross platform to Mac and linux I assume it is not that much different to shipping electron ?

Browsers start up quite fast, that's not it.

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