• habanhero@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Calling Slack a webpage is like calling an office building a room.

      Slack is just as much a complex app as anything else even if it’s built on web tech and standards.

      • Ethan@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        The point is that Slack does not take advantage of Electron at all. It’s no better than running it in a browser.

        • habanhero@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          For Slack it does. Building an app via Electron means it’s cross-platform by default, so Slack doesn’t need to invest in separate platform teams to solve the same problem (Windows, macOS, Linux).

          Electron also has better support for things like native notifications, video and voice calls, offline capabilities, and to other native APIs etc that are either unsupported or spottily supported via the browser.

            • habanhero@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              It has all this support for native platforms yet it’s always a clunky memory hog

              Maybe so but it has improved a lot over time. The app devs share some responsibility too so it’s not all on Electron.

              zero effort to respect the design language of the OS it’s running on.

              That’s the Dev’s design choice, not a limitation of Electron.

              I’m on macOS, I want the app to be a native macOS app. If I wanted it to look like a webpage, or Windows, or Linux GTK then I’d switch to one of those and expect it to match those paradigms.

              I don’t disagree but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter to enough people for it to become an issue. People are used to Slack and the way it works.

              Moreover the cost of building the same app 2x or 3x simply doesn’t make business sense.

              • anti-idpol action@programming.dev
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                1 year ago

                It’s a much more lightweight option for building cross platfrom apps than Electron. Heck, even Tauri is better than Electron even though it also uses web technologies for UI.

                • habanhero@lemmy.ca
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                  1 year ago

                  Flutter came to market much later. It wasn’t even a thing when Slack started building using Electron. I’m sure the same applies to Tauri as well.