Here's the thing. You know what the alternative to all of these Electron apps coming out is? If your answer is "A native Cocoa/WPF app", you are on another planet, the answer is, "It wouldn't exist at all".

Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies. And as for Qt, Qt has existed for over two decades - if its massive "Beatles walking off the plane" moment hasn't happened by then, sorry, it's not gonna.

But now? People are making all kinds of great new apps, and more often than not, they come out on all three platforms. People are excited about the Desktop again - Electron is so good it's single-handedly revitalizing the platform that two of the largest tech companies in the world are behind, yet couldn't do.

That is a Big Deal.

That's nonsense. Desktop apps have been frequently released since forever.

The underlying issue here is that Electron reduces the barrier to entry for cross-platform development. That is, it's cheaper to build a single cross-platform application in Electron than it is to build two or three native applications, and you can re-use your existing web experience. I can completely understand why companies might choose this approach.

The trade-off — and there is a trade-off — is that Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications. They fail to integrate with the host platform, they are slow, they hog memory and drink power. It's fine to make those trade-offs – in some ways, it's better that you can get an application at all than the alternative of 'no support for your platform'. But let's be honest here – there is nothing preventing e.g. Spotify or Slack from building native clients for each platform they support, and I find it difficult to believe that the costs would be prohibitive.

> ... Electron applications are shite in comparison with proper native applications.

Is that true from a user's perspective? The average user I know would not have the idea that Slack is somehow inherently worse than say MS Word or any other truly native app they use everyday. What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac?

Slack starts up too fast for me to read the little quotation (penultimate Macbook Pro). I actually wish it was slightly slower because I like those cheesy quotes when I can catch them. Everything feels almost instant. Not bash instant, but as fast as any mainstream messaging app.

I leave it running all the time and get what feels like normal full hours upon hours of battery life. There are apps or browser tabs that I've noticed destroying battery life, but Slack nor Atom nor MS Visual code are on that list for me.

The anti-Electron complaints all kind of feel like the same argument that comes up as each new layer of abstraction gains acceptance. I'm sure there's a lot that Electron can and should improve. Running multiple copies of Chrome does sound awful, but until I read that I didn't know the atrocities it was committing.

Just doesn't feel productive to try to make Electron go away vs. working to improve it or create a better cross-platform abstraction.

> Is that true from a user's perspective?

It is for this user.

> What would Slack gain by integrating better with my Mac?

Far better resource management, one would hope, for starters. As the article pointed out, when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem.

It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MBP. So Slack gets turned off, and maybe someone gets annoyed that I don't respond to something, while I run a few VMs in Slack's former memory space.

As far as other things, well, using a platform's capabilities as appropriate is generally considered good form - HCI concerns, and, generally, just people like things to be consistent. I don't know why we're supposed to forget this now.

I personally don't care if Electron goes away or what, but to the extent that I'm forced to run Slack by my cow-orkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass.

> I personally don't care if Electron goes away or what, but to the extent that I'm forced to run Slack by my cow-orkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass.

For what it's worth, since you seem to like IRC clients so much better, Slack has a built-in IRC bridge: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t.... It works just fine, in my experience.

From experience, using the bridge means pinging the admin on slack about it, and convincing them that it's even worth doing, and then being stuck in "The IRC Room", instead of the others rooms in which people are actually communicating.

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

I use it extensively for everyday Slack, where I don't care much about inline media and inline formatting. And for a text client, weechat + this plugin handle it pretty gracefully.