A chat client that takes multiple hundreds of MBs of RAM and sucks battery life prodigiously should be, if not illegal, at the very least a violation of unwritten international norms.
It's actually not the first to do this. Adium (AIM) and Colloquy (IRC) switched to WebKit theming in the 2000s, when computers were /really/ too slow to run it.
I've never experienced this very common criticism of slack on here. When I occasionally check, Slack is using around 500mb or RAM. A lot for a chat app? Sure. But it has little to no affect on either my 16gb or 8gb machines.
RAM alone isn’t the problem. The issue is that is so laggy and slow. Poor algorithms on 500mb of bad data structures can bring any modern machine to its knees.
Just reloaded the Slack tab in Firefox to clear down 1GB of RAM use.
As I do every day.
Every single day.
For the one single channel I join. with no PMs and no threads, no file transfers, no voice or video anything.
Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if it was astonishingly good. But it isn't. It isn't even basically competent, it's terrible. Terrible at scrolling back, terrible at editing previous lines, appalling at completing names properly, bad at search, and completely lacking at customizing when it displays 2MB animated gifs inline.
I would expect a 4Gb machine would mean I never have to check on a text chat client. Apparently not.
For me it’s a usability thing—I tend to lose track of SPA tabs, often by closing the window or not being able to differentiate them from content tabs. I do use web apps but I vastly prefer using my machine’s window manager and window buttons/lists.
I use a tool like applicationize (https://applicationize.me/) to make a chrome app for a site. It mimicks an app, but is running as a tab in chrome. Saves memory but gives the benefit of separate window and workspace management (I can tab to it, it can have icon etc).
Using lots of browser tabs instead of applications appears to me to be a step backward in usability. Instead of relying on the window manager to organise your work, you add cognitive load instead.
Eh, you can just put Slack into it's own window if you're going to use multiple tabs for it. Personally, I just pin it next to my email and it works fine.
I'm not a fan of how much RAM or CPU it uses. I tried the desktop app hoping it would be better, but it seems like it's perhaps worse (I use Firefox, so
Not great for web developers. We have enough tabs open and if every window is a chrome icon it’s a pain to find stuff. I’ve got karma tests running, selenium tests, incognito windows testing security etc etc.
> Why does anyone use the app instead of the site?
Because on Android at least the website detects that you're on a mobile device and switches to read-only mode. Correct, you can't even post a reply without fudging user-agent or installing the app.
As a web developer I’m often using my browser as a guinea pig. Hell a selenium test shut the whole shit down and hijacked it today. I’m not going to run slack in the browser.
I agree. There is no law against half-assed, bloated Electron based desktop software that can bring even recent hardware to its knees.