
Slack: Other browsers require significant effort so we're focused on Chrome - dustinmoris
https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/958645632620748800
======
mful
I'm getting a little sick of the level of entitlement in tech conversations —
every firm must adhere perfectly to some set ideals or else the most vocal
members in the community turn the conversation into an end-of-the-internet
melodrama.

We laud companies that start by doing something small well, yet the second
they don't support our platform of choice, it's time to banish them to the
hills. (In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat
performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?)

We preach focus, then act appalled when customization feature X stagnates on
the backlog.

We castigate businesses that spend investor dollars frivolously, and are then
furious when well-funded companies act frugally and choose to make tradeoffs
(like, say, only supporting one browser for a feature that doesn't work the
same on all browsers, until they can achieve a certain quality threshold.)

I look forward to the day when we collectively accept that companies are
groups of humans generally working in earnest to do their best, not some
faceless behemoth that responds only to screaming "you're awful, do my feature
or I'm leaving and tweeting about it" like some petulant child. Maybe there
are cases where that is a reasonable response, but when the volume is always
turned up to 11 it's hard to tell the real crises from distractions.

~~~
dictum
Without the heated tone ("entitlement in tech conversations") there's often no
response to a valid complaint.

We only get clear explanations from a company's engineers after a discussion
is raised.

> In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat
> performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?

I look forward to a post on
[https://slack.engineering](https://slack.engineering) detailing the
challenges. I'm not demanding a response, it's just a wish.

My decision to use a product takes certain principles into account; Slack is
the kind of product that is often chosen for you by your company/open source
project/community. A bit of "entitlement" — not meant as scare quotes, I just
don't share the viewpoint – makes sense here, because sometimes you can't just
choose not to use it.

~~~
zkomp
This exactly!

The error message say "Please switch to chrome"

It is clumsy. They probably ment to say: use Chrome for voice support.

Anyway: if it is entitlement to choose your own browser? Then I say: "switch
to Internet Explorer 6"...

------
nikanj
They raised quarter a billion(!) last summer.

What on earth are they doing with that money. Building web-based chat apps
should not be that capital intensive

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/slack-is-
raising-a-250-mil...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/slack-is-
raising-a-250-million-round-at-5-billion-valuation/)

~~~
Afforess
I'm curious why more money equals faster or better software engineering.
Didn't we collectively learn from the Mythical Man Month and others that
throwing people at a software problem doesn't scale? More engineers on a
project increases communication and administrative overhead; the additional
overhead and context costs quickly exceeds any productivity gained.

Given this: Why would more money scale, when people - presumably the thing the
money would pay for - has already been shown not to scale?

~~~
BoorishBears
That applies to a single project and a single team.

With much less than a quarter billion dollars you could spin off new
companies, "Slack Calls For Firefox Inc." and "Slack Calls For Edge Inc." each
with it's own development team dedicated to supporting a given browser, and
still not break the bank.

It's just a business choice. It's not they can't, do just don't feel it's
worth it.

------
matchbok
Another reason to dump this fad. I've been using slack for my jobs for years,
and it wastes more time than saves. No real work gets done in a chat room,
which is what slack is. It's a shame a private, bad experience is so popular
now.

Try search for a conversation with someone in a channel about topic X. You
can't do it, because there is no context. Search for the keyword or person?
Good luck with that. Even then, if you find it, it just scrolls you to that
spot, which is terrible UI.

Ugh.

~~~
nasso
Are there any better (modern) alternatives?

~~~
dcu
twist app, maybe

~~~
matchbok
I've heard/seen good things.

------
andygcook
There's more context if you scroll down in the thread. In my opinion, they
should try to support more browsers sooner and build on standards, but I do
understand starting with the browser that has the biggest market share to
prove out the feature, then expanding from there.

\---

"We're afraid our first response may have come off a little more limiting that
we meant it — we're focusing on Chrome for our calls support specifically, but
that does not mean we have no plans to expand to other browsers in the
future!"

\---

"Apologies — our initial tweet wasn't as clear as it could have been. We
didn't mean to imply that future support for other browsers is off the cards,
just that it's not on the cards right now."

~~~
dustinmoris
> We didn't mean to imply that future support for other browsers is off the
> cards, just that it's not on the cards right now

If something is not on the cards RIGHT NOW then it doesn't mean "we released
this feature on Chrome first and the rest is following", it means "we don't
believe in cross browser support (=diversity) unless enough people scream loud
enough". A very web damaging attitude in my opinion.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_" we don't believe in [foo] unless enough people scream loud enough"_

Every piece of advice about how to build products gives this exact advice. Why
is it not applicable to Slack? Because of their funding amounts?

Again, this is a genuine question, why is the case of slack different than any
other company?

------
kuon
I could push for another discussion medium at my company, but the thing is
that I'm connected to a lot of FOSS slacks (elixir, elm, postgresql...). I
don't want to give more GB of rams to another client that I'll have to run in
//.

I still have my irssi in a tmux terminal when I need it, but it's not a UI I
can push over to my teammate (not mentioning the lack of voice call).

Slack somehow did a great job at solving "something", I'm not sure if it was
the lack of communication or something else. Sadly, it's taking more and more
RAM and stance like not supporting non Chrome makes me even less comfortable
using it.

~~~
progval
> I still have my irssi in a tmux terminal when I need it, but it's not a UI I
> can push over to my teammate

What about IRCCloud?

~~~
benwilber0
Love and use IRCCloud everyday. Well worth the $5 or whatever to have a truly
great IRC client in browser (and it's by far the best on Android). People
still ask me why I pay for IRC because it just sounds crazy given the glut of
high-quality free software IRC clients but my answer is always just that it's
the best and since I spend a lot of my time in IRC I prefer to just pay for
the best software/experience.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Reminder: IRC works on literally everything, uses kilobytes rather than
gigabytes of RAM, and is a widly supported open protocol with many competing
implementations.

~~~
lostmsu
Does it have push notifications and mobile client with full text search across
the public/company wide chat history with access control?

~~~
michaelmrose
There is also email and mailing lists which have those things. IRC can also
have public logging and full text search in a universal client called a web
browser.

~~~
lostmsu
Mailing lists on their own do not provide ACLs, and the only way to read
existing private topic is for somebody to forward you all the messages. Are
there existing nodes, that do that automatically for you?

------
dang
The submitted title, "Slack can't afford to support browsers other than
Chrome", broke the HN guidelines by editorializing. The text says nothing
about not being able to afford. It may sound the same if you don't look
closely, but please do look closely, because even tiny distortions in titles
can have large effects on HN discussion.

If you need to paraphrase a title to make it fit, or change it because the
original was misleading or linkbait (as
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
asks), do it by finding the most representative language in the text itself.

~~~
dustinmoris
Thanks for pointing this out to me!

------
iaw
Funny thing is I am aware of another product from a better funded company that
doesn't support video chat outside of Chrome...

I am not sure if this is a problem with Slack's attitude or if it's that the
overhead for creating a voice/video chat app in browsers besides Chrome is
much more substantial...

Has anyone tried to implement a web based video chat in Firefox before? Is it
really that challenging?

~~~
jcelerier
meet.jit.si works fine in firefox

------
pcwalton
Folks often ask "what's the problem, why not just have Blink be the only
browser engine?"

One important reason is that there's a lot of innovation that happens outside
of Blink that will not happen inside Blink. Blink shows no sign of permitting
Rust components such as the parallel restyling engine that Gecko uses.

Another issue is that Blink is not designed to be embeddable in other browsers
like Safari. The friction of having to maintain multiple "ports" in one
codebase was much of the reason for the WebKit/Blink fork to begin with.

~~~
dictum
This is an opportune moment for me to say thank you to everyone at Mozilla for
maintaining and improving Gecko.

That there's a browser as good as the current Firefox is another reason to not
lock ourselves into a Blink monoculture.

Of course, even if FF was in a bad state we should try to avoid de-facto
standardization of Chrome, but with FF improving with each version, there's a
practical, sellable argument for diversity.

------
bdz
We started using Discord and we really like it. It is targeted towards gaming
communities (basically to replace TS3, Ventrilo, Mumble etc) but I think it's
comparable to Slack too

------
akerro
Our company recently started using Chime [1] it supports Chrome, Firefox and
afair Edge, it's quite pleasant to use for video-audio chats in a browser. It
uses WSS and WebRTC so it works behind NAT where SIP can't, also it looks like
it's a P2P technology so your voice and video traffic doesn't go to central
server (I might be wrong about it).

[1] [https://www.justchimein.com/en/](https://www.justchimein.com/en/)

~~~
Corrado
At first I thought you were talking about the Amazon service. It turns out
that Amazon has a voice chat service called Chime as well, though it's more
narrow of focus than the CafeX system that you are using.

------
michaelmrose
So how much money did google float them for exclusive features. For me it
recalls when skype limited the number of participants in calls if you used an
AMD processor or limited the resolution unless you purchased specific webcams
from partners.

~~~
mcintyre1994
I doubt it. They're built on Electron, they get Chrome support free and
probably just don't want to spend any resources on making it work in other
browsers because most of their users use the native apps.

------
atarian
My takeaway from this is that you can build a billion dollar company by only
supporting a single browser.

------
SkyPuncher
I don't think this is an issue specific to Slack. It seems like the trend with
nearly all real-time video/voice software. You either use chrome or get the
desktop app.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
You raise a good point. This conversation would benefit from someone
articulating what particular issues are making it hard to support certain
features in other browsers.

------
olliej
This is literally the exact argument people made when only supporting IE6 (and
remember at that point in history IE was arguably the best browser, warts and
all)

------
zkomp
Sigh. Slackers gonna be slacking.

Why are we regressing back to the horrible world of vendor lock in and single
browser sites. Chrome is the new IE6?

------
ikonst
WebRTC is somewhat new and complex, and browser support varies greatly. I
don't know what kind of unlimited resources behemoth you imagine Slack to be,
but I can definitely see how doing _consistently working_ cross-browser WebRTC
would be too much effort to be able to pull off at a given time.

~~~
zoul
$250M sounds pretty behemotish?

~~~
ikonst
Maybe not for the operation they're running, of which VoIP is only a small
part.

------
solomatov
I remember similar conversation from long ago times, but instead of chrome we
had IE6.

------
chrisweekly
Given Slack's desktop app is Electron-based, and the electron renderer is
~chrome [note the tilde!], they may be effectively developing for [web + MacOS
+ Windows + Linux] without bothering with any other browsers.

------
scarface74
If Slack is "focusing their efforts" on their battery draining, slow, badly
written excuse for a desktop app. I can't tell.

------
thriftwy
But so is Hangouts which is a much larger issue IMO, as it doesn't have a
desktop client (does it?)

------
leothekim
Why is this important? There are standalone clients for Slack available on
Mac, Windows, and Linux.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Because the standalone client uses Electron and eats up battery life, CPU, and
memory like cheap sushi.

------
jpalomaki
”It requires significant effort for us to build out support and triage issues
on each browser, so we're focused on providing a great experience in Chrome
and our desktop apps. ”

They are not saying they can’t afford it. Money they have, engineering talent
tends to be always on short supply. You need to think where you put the
effort.

------
Talyen42
More Money != Faster Development

------
jimjimjim
Which do i hate more, slack or web apps limited to certain browsers? Now i
don't need to choose.

------
jimjimjim
Yagni is making the world worse.

------
txsh
Why should they support browsers that make dramatic, arbitrary changes on a
whim? Chrome is the only browser that remains stable. Who knows what Firefox
or Edge will look like next year?

~~~
yladiz
Do you have proof that Chrome is the only "stable" browser? Is your standard
for stability Chrome, meaning that by definition Chrome is stable and other
browsers aren't if they aren't exactly like Chrome?

------
weberc2
This is a bogus headline. They can't justify the cost of developing video chat
for other browsers. The truth is much less interesting than the misleading
implications.

NOTE: I posted this comment before the title was corrected by the mods for
editorializing.

