Hacker News Reader

Comment by skullone | Hacker News Reader

It even pains me to see they're suffering from so many own goals. And it's unfortunately reflected in the poor experience using the Slack client. Not to mention the multiple deprecated bot/integration APIs with such bad feature parity between all the different ways to integrate your own tooling into Slack.

View on HN

What do you mean? Slack is one of the most responsive and reliable tools I touch every day.

How slow are the rest of your tools? The Slack client probably performs worse today than it did a few years ago. It has the laggiest interface of any of my tools, you can watch your CPU spike to 60-80% just switching channels. Just do it right now, open up htop/top/atop/Activity Monitor - whatever you want, and just switch channels. Laugh as the Slack client wastes a universe's worth of time just... rendering a DOM with plain text. It is genuinely pathetic how bad the client is.

I hope this is satire. Slack is one of the slowest work tools I've ever used. Every interaction and click visibly lags.

It's a sad state of the world that almost every application now is written in Javascript and deployed with Electron, and massive memory usage and slow UIs have become accepted as the norm.

Try any IRC client and tell me, with a straight face, that Slack is just as responsive.

So I only use Firefox and the Slack web client and don't experience any lag. I am surprised so many people use the Slack app over a web tab.

Very interesting. I have used Slack for work on a MacBook for years, and I have never once noticed any responsiveness issues or lags at all.

Ok genuine question: what other tools do you use?

Slack won’t seem that bad, until you use something that’s actually good.

The loss of performance on commonplace applications has been a real “boil the frog” situation; we’ve lost so much performance and responsiveness, but it’s happened so gradually that most people don’t notice.

Well, status.slack.com says they're currently having an outage, that has been ongoing for multiple days.

There was a time when this was the case (and electron was the punching bag for critics at the time, iirc) but I don’t think this criticism is fair anymore. Slack is quite responsive and performant these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com