Desktop Slack runs on Electron, no? Which essentially lets web developers develop a "native-ish" cross-platform app, without learning a whole new platform.

There is a long, long history of attempts to make good, cross-platform, native apps. In the late 1990s there was a company called Visix that had such a library that worked on Windows and Unix. There have been Windows implementations of Motif/XWindows. There was of course Java/JWT. These days there is Qt. None of these seem to have really caught fire.

edit: I wrote Mac but I meant Unix

Qt and Java can do cross platform software, however it's not possible to make a UI that's usable on desktop, tablet and mobile. You will end up creating separate apps.

Qt is actually really impressive in my opinion, it's possible to recompile a desktop software for mobile, sometimes without any code change at all.

Yeah, because cross-platform is a PITA. The reason web apps are popular is they're thin-terminals. You write your business logic on your mainframe/terminal server (linux vps) and the web app just handles the user interface. You maintain less portable code, deployment and upgrade is easier, and it simplifies the user experience a bit. The downside being network issues and supporting the server.

I wish that was the case. Web developers nowadays try to push as much code as they can out into the browser, to be run client-side.

I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. It's almost no different from the web client, but eats more RAM if you already have Chrome open. Just pin Slack in a tab and save your memory

> I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular.

In-dock notifications and system notifications are my reasons, as well as a dedicated window I can alt-tab to instead of tabbing through browser windows, then navigating to the Slack tab.

(I realize that for some people, "hiding" Slack in a pinned tab may be a feature.)

Web Slack does system notifications. You may have to turn them on explicitly because it requires a permission (can't recall if you do or if it prompts you, but it is something you have to enable), but if it's working in my Linux browser I'm assuming it works in Windows and OSX. I don't know if that would also integrate with in-dock notifications or not. If so, making it a viable alt-tab target would just be running it in a separate browser window, which should still net many fewer used resources than a separate app.

If you are happy, no problem. I'm posting for general info.

> can't recall if you do or if it prompts you, but it is something you have to enable

It does. In fact, it keeps displaying an annoying blue-colored topbar telling you that your life will be better if you enable notifications (fortunately, with the option to snooze it or dismiss it completely on given machine).

> In-dock notifications and system notifications are my reasons, as well as a dedicated window I can alt-tab to instead of tabbing through browser windows, then navigating to the Slack tab.

Emacs-slack can get you all of that:-)

I'm aware of the fact that Emacs is a fully fledged operating system :P

Just open in a separate chrome window?

In OS X, if I alt-tab over to Chrome, it will focus on whatever window I had in focus last; I'd still have to Command-Tilde to find the Slack one.

I know, it's a minor kvetch. But it's a minor kvetch I can solve with a gig of RAM.

Try Chrome web app mode: https://superuser.com/questions/33548/starting-google-chrome...

You may be interested in an app called HyperSwitch. It lets you tab between individual windows of each app! There’s also opt-tab which will cycle through individual app windows.

I find it runs faster and is more stable in the desktop client, but I switched a couple of years ago so that may no longer matter (also ymmv etc).

you can only do video conf through the app

The point would be the same even if nobody used the client except to start it up for measuring bloat.

I'd be saying "Yeah!" along with you, but that client is also a video chat and audio calling app, not just text and images.

There's bloatware out there, and this may even qualify, but it isn't just text chat. (Why would you use the desktop client for text chat anyway?)

Skype also has audio and video, with custom codecs even, and p2p, yet it wasn't even close to using the very real 1gb of ram slack consumes

(I'm talking about the old desktop client, not the new electron based one)

audio/video work fine in chromium.

It contains Chromium in it's entirety, which is a contemporary full featured browser, which is actually in a way a complete operating system.

My GMail tab runs between 225MB and 400MB+. And I used to think Java's memory usage was bad...

If I leave gmail open too long, it starts eating 100% of CPU for some reason (Firefox on Linux).

I'm using Opera on both Linux & Windows 10. It's pretty light on the CPU, but I get the "Out of Memory" screens regularly (on 16GB machines!).