Of course it does not apply to everything, some apps do need every last clock cycle of speed, but so far none of mine had.
For comparison, the Playstation 3 has 256MB of system RAM, and manages to run GTA V.
[0] See the Ripcord application, discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23163960
Is there a mobile app? Nope! Dead on arrival. In 2020, Slack or Teams or anything similar is literally useless without a mobile app.
Feature matrix says animated emojis will arrive "never." lol!
I remember the days of native chat clients like Skype and AIM. I remember how Linux and Mac platforms were basically half-clients compared to Windows. It sucked.
Electron applications like Slack and Spotify work everywhere, exactly the same. And if you think about it, that's why something like chat and music apps would prioritize ease of cross-platform deployment over perfect efficiency. They're not particularly demanding, and they are most valuable to people when they're ubiquitous. If Spotify isn't in every device I own it loses a great amount of value.
Nobody's sitting at their Activity Monitor staring at the RAM usage of Slack or Teams. In reality, performance is fine. It's just chat.
(Interestingly enough, I've never found a music application that skips tracks more quickly than Spotify, even for locally-stored music. It's just instant with no gaps.)
Yes, because they're just web pages. Then why not just use the browser to display them?
So does the Mac I'm using.
Slack is taking less than 1% of my Ram.
PS3 was released 13 YEARS ago.
At the time AIM was the dominant chat client, and it probably took more like 5% of RAM available.
That's why I used it for my example. Past systems are a useful benchmark for what it's practical to do with a certain level of computational horsepower.
> Slack is taking less than 1% of my Ram.
My system has 8GB, so 3.7%. I'd rather have 3.4% of my memory back.
More broadly, we should consider that we may run many bloated apps. Even if Slack doesn't do too much harm on its own, if all your desktop apps are using 10x the resources they could be using, it adds up to you spending more on hardware than you should have to.
You paid for that 16GB of RAM. That should let you do a lot more than old computers can, rather than doing the same things we did 15 years ago with bloated software.
> At the time AIM was the dominant chat client, and it probably took more like 5% of RAM available.
Right, like Ripcord, it did roughly the same thing Slack/Teams do, using far fewer resources.
Sure, people could spend more money to mostly sidestep the issue (supposing they didn't have any workloads which actually benefited from all available RAM), but that doesn't make it a non-issue.
Slack has, to put it mildly, plenty of money, and gave us a 300MB bloated client. Ripcord is a payware alternative client made by a single developer.
Things seem to be precisely backward.
I think there are some UI niceties to the 'app' version but it's essentially the same.
Teams refers to Microsoft's competing product. Like Slack, its desktop app is really just the web version.
However, it might also make it harder to find bugs and it will produce bloat with real, noticeable consequences - e.g. increased RAM, CPU and disk usage, more sluggish UI behavior, etc - except, those effects will happen on the user's machine, not the developer's, so a developer might be tempted to ignore them.
