I find slack so bloated and slow it would probably take me about 15 minutes to realise it was actually down.
Like they used to.
Then it became just another crappy messaging app.
It's not like they're implementing thousands of native controls or user interface components - a listview with an edit box at the bottom...
Look at 1Password and the amount of shit they get on HN with the beta version. Rewrites are hard and they take a tooooooon of time to do correctly and require a lot of engineering work to keep the product consistent across platforms.
Do I wish that electron apps were better optimized? Yes, however, I also can accept the tradeoff for apps that need to work "everywhere".
For the most part, Slack works just fine. Their problems are less the UI/UX and more to do with infrastructure. Slack rewriting to a native app would have a tiny (if any) effect on these outages.
Really? One code base, one language, write features once. I think it's more about eng resourcing (headcount, onboarding, roadmap parity / feature drift, etc) than whether making a native app is hard.
Anecdotal, but I feel like the React Natives and Electrons have made it so you see less "Sorry we're only on Mac", and "We're only on Android, iOS coming soon!" from apps
There's the problem, nobody's sorry for offering only these static 100MB chat clients taking 2GB+ of RAM once launched. These apps are technically ridiculous, especially since all they do is embed a website. I mean, if all your company's willing to deliver is website, why even bother with the apps... But that's all fine right? We'll just upgrade to 64GB and 128GB machines soon!
If they've already got many JS developers onboard, it's normal that their opinion will be biased and they wouldn't want to switch to another language and essentially make their own job obsolete (except for the minority that also happens to be equally-proficient in whatever desktop programming language is chosen).
Everywhere I've been, we always "choose the right tool for the job". Recently, making apps that can run across every OS and in the browser, the right tool for the job has been JS (well, TypeScript these days, but same thing).
This is not true in any way. Slack also have workspaces, channels, notifications, video calls, file sharing, admin tools and probably even more features. It's not just IRC.
Maybe writing a web-based app is lazy... except when you have to write native apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS, and some people still need access via a browser. And each one has different ways of displaying images and videos and doing calls and handling file access. Now you have 5+ apps that you're maintaining, each with their own dedicated team since each one is unique. Want to roll out a new feature? Cool, now you have to write it 5 times across 5 teams. Good look coordinating that.
I know there are technologies that let you share code across all of the different native clients. But a webview wrapped in i.e. Electron handles most of it for you! Why would you do it any other way except to appease people who complain about bloat?
Slack already has three different clients - a web one (which includes the Electron desktop wrappers), one for Android, and one for iOS.
They've already demonstrated that they have the engineering resources and coordination to develop and maintain three completely separate clients (albeit poorly) - so adding a fourth one (native C++ codebase using Qt that would work well on Windows, Mac, and Linux) would not be the Herculean engineering effort required to go from one to five, and your implicit assertions that (1) they currently only have a single client and (2) that a different client would be required for each of Windows, macOS, and Linux are simply false.
> But a webview wrapped in i.e. Electron handles most of it for you! Why would you do it any other way except to appease people who complain about bloat?
Because (1) performance (2) accessibility and (3) stability - the things that users actually need. Slack's performance is extremely bad and you get people constantly complaining about it; their accessibility is janky and suboptimal because they're reinventing desktop UI controls on the web; and their applications have repeatedly broken (such as the disastrous input box rewrite[1]) because they're trying to do things with the web platform that it wasn't meant to do. (in case you're wondering how using a desktop client would help - you expose a "lite" version of your functionality in the web application and put the full functionality in the desktop tool)
You're using "appease" as marketing-speak for "fix the very real problems with their web application that people constantly complain about". Slack should fix their application because it isn't serving the users well. Performance problems are functionality problems.
As it stands, Slack is showing us that they aren't even pretending to care about their users - they're just trying to make a buck selling to large organizations.
https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/07/21/sa...