Slack's 57MB 404 page
a.slack.com
a.slack.com
I'm guessing most of that code is used for other things on the website/landing page (SPA without bundle splitting per page), and the same stuff is loaded for every page, since the code for building that would be trivial compared to the multiple large bundles like they're shipping right now.
Which kind of makes me think, what is the smallest amount of JS one could write to 100% replicate this page? Would <1KB be enough? Bonus points if it could be implemented with CSS only, under 1KB.
And what part uses the visibility state? The grayscale seems to be triggered by focus which I think would be doable with CSS
At a glance I'm not sure exactly how I'd implement it, but my guess is that it's possible with some workarounds and hacks, at the very least.
Here's an article showing some demos (at the bottom) on how you can make the mouse cursor affect CSS: https://css-tricks.com/how-to-map-mouse-position-in-css/
Wow, that phrase triggered a tune burried deep in my brain I hadn’t heard in 20 years.
Brains are weird
- VisiCalc: ~27KB - i.e. the first killer app, and probably still the most successful. I wonder what DAUs on excel & google sheets compared to tiktok and insta are like...would be interesting to see.
- Wolfenstein 3D (1992): ~2MB - invented the FPS genre
- DOOM (1993): ~2.5MB (shareware), ~12MB (full)
- Quake (shareware) ~8.7 MB
- Quake (full) ~15-25 MB (excludes the CD audio)
- nginx: ~2-5MB - powers ~35% of all websites
- bash: ~1MB
- git (*nix only): ~3mb
- gcc + toolchain (ie ld, cc1, etc) ~40-45 mb
- FFmpeg: ~30-40MB
- curl: ~3MB
- OpenSSL: ~5MB
- windows 95: 50-55MB depending on features installed
- google.com circa 1998 - 10-15kb
- google.com today (anonymous session, ublock disabled) ~700kb
edit: my kingdom for markdown
I was just spending long weekend at place with less perfect connectivity, that is 2-3 Mbs LTE... And the 11MB would have taken quite many seconds... Not exactly good user experience.
Good to know that Slack is not company to choose for user experience and efficiency.
I'm not sure, I've seen plenty of cases where programmers do stop and ask "Should we?" while management says "It's not ideal, but you have 4 hours allocated to shipping this things, so decide the "right" approach for achieving our OKRs" or similar.
Most of my professional experience is from working in smaller startups, grown into medium-sized ones, that I've picked to approach for work because I liked the programmers who already worked there, I'm guessing that's why :)
Consulting for various IT and IT-adjacent companies of all types of sizes, I certainly understand where you coming from, they tend to already be burned out (or something) enough to not ask questions anymore.
If you have mobility, it's worth shopping around for a decent place to work.
This is an effect from no one prioritizing extra complexity that might / might not provide any tangible value.
"I did what my manager asked me to. Asking questions is no in my job description. I've got kids to feed".
Did the product itself not give it away? ;)
I get perks like not seeing reaction emojis, gifs, and being able to mute the constant flow of @channel notifications by configuring a list of people or channels from which I am not interested in getting these generic notifications.
Also most importantly, since my company recently shifted from treating us like adults to telling us we must only work on the assigned tasks and for no reason go out of task, I configured it to not join general discussions channels where people ask for help and such things. In theory I'm on them, but from the point of view of my IRC client I'm not.
It re-joins automatically if someone mentions me specifically. Unfortunately it won't fetch the history when this happens so I might need to open the real slack to get the context before I can answer.
Anyway, it has worked mostly fine for me… I can have decent battery life and I don't get most of the useless notifications.
Same with how much space the entire thing wastes: it's clearly designed by people with 8K 30" monitors and perfect vision.
I have many more gripes, but that would be too off-topic. I don't understand how it got so popular.
Organizes a meeting: “we look like clowns”. Technical person explains the package being big. Non technical person asks to remove, hoping for some kind of correction story. Marketing people looped in to maybe come up with a way to float this story.
Fix is evaluated for in a couple of sprints from now. A simpler html page is shipped for the sprint. Everybody high fives about one month from now for the simpler html page.
Non technical manager feels like they delivered something and the org is sluggish but they can get things done.
There was a whole thread the other day about a framework for smuggling these huge analytics bundles through content blockers. Funny it was just around the same time another large thread was on the front page full of marketing people spazing out over the low click through rate when people are given AI summaries and aren't forced to "experience" these corporate sites running on their computers.
On the upside, thing does cache, and LocalCDN handles most of it.
There's a discussion to be had as to whether the Slack app should be 48mb, but that's a different discussion. Focusing on the 404 page feels like outrage bait for web devs.
Yes, a 6MB (compressed) bundle is big. But it is not clear that the alternatives are better. The bundle would need to be split increasing complexity of building the application.
It is likely judged that splitting the bundle only has minimal positives compared to the negatives - which also align with my experiecne developing software for roughly the same target segment.
The things developers usually forget is that there are other stakeholders than the computer executing code - IMHO a lot of developers would benefit from developing a bit of business acumen.
This is exactly the type of business acumen that is missing.
This is exactly why developers need more business acumen.
This isn't about being performative. This is about having fun. Blame a thousand Web 2.0 companies from yesteryear or blame Google for their legacy of little jokey easter eggs. This has a nod to Slack's history and some devs got to blow off some steam and have some fun. Would it be better if they crammed the animation into 1kb? Sure, but this isn't a demoscene comp. And perhaps Marketing gets a positive bump for it when someone shares it saying this is cool (or conversely threads like this).
This is about having some fun. It's part of our internet roots and culture.
57.54 MB / 11.83 MB transferred
There's only 11.83 MB transferred, but that doesn't excuse it.
Slack won't be 'extinguished' but it will have a falling market share, despite the dumpster fire that is Teams, and the bean-counters in most corporations getting kudos from their bosses for 'cost savings'.
Ive been using them since 2021 iirc and they improved a lot
And im using Discord daily which is state of the art
Calendar and meetings are decent, chat is viable and I dont need more
Whats causing problems for you?
It's the least reliable chat program I've ever used.
Used differently I'd say, but can't say I have a 100% view of all the users. My feeling is that various software projects moved to Discord instead (particularly FOSS which feels strange), and Slack seen an uptake in enterprise usage which makes sense considering the new(-ish) owner.
I suppose you're supposed to use the whole Microsoft "ecosystem" for what a single app can do.
It also seems like someone at Slack is tasked with driving up engagement, because I get these "Your team is missing you" messages from Slack (only to be find a dead slack community). That might be a sign that they're losing traction?
Discord is mostly used by devs.