The GitHub website is slow on Safari

> a single well made react app

What about Slack, the messenger?

Umm, Discord? SoundCloud? Trello? Bandcamp? Spotify?

If I keep going there are actually hundreds and thousands of well-made react apps.

Isn't the most common complaint against Slack that it's not optimized enough for what it does ? That's how I read the rants against its electron app, and people are already choosing the electron app against using it straight in the browser (as they'd do for Gmail or Calendar for instance)

Slack is one the most slick and pleasant pieces of software to use. It's big success as well as the fact that it's acquisition cost was one of the largest software deals ever – tells of itself – it's certainly a fine piece of software made by fine engineers who used react and electron with a certain amount of dignity. People who rant about tools like react or electron affecting their performance just don't want to understand that it's organisation and people behind the tools who are responsible for their performance.

I'd make an argument about the need for Slack to go beyond.

As you point out it's wildly successful and is the backbone of many groups internal communication. Many companies would just stop working without Slack, that's a testament to the current team's efforts, but also something that critical would merit better perfs.

I'd make the comparison with Figma, which went the extra mile to bring a level of smoothness that just wouldn't be there otherwise.

Discord is well-known to be very buggy, e.g. the search function. Spotify is also very slow with thousands of placeholder skeletons. Remember that Spotify once had a very fast native player.

Ah, since Atlassian has been increasingly messing with Trello over the past couple years, it has really gone to shit. I currently have a Firefox profile dedicated solely to it, using >2 gigs of memory and about 1/3 of an M1 core. It has cumulatively used about a day's worth of CPU time in since I booted in 6 days ago. In contrast, the profile dedicated to Slack is using 750 MB and has burned about 27 minutes of CPU time.

> Spotify is also very slow with thousands of placeholder skeletons. Remember that Spotify once had a very fast native player.

Are you under the impression that the placeholder skeletons are there and slow because of React? How would a UI written in C++ get the data quicker from the back end to replace the skeleton with?

> Slack is one the most slick and pleasant pieces of software to use

I've never heard anyone say that before!

Slack is the best of a bunch of trash options. That doesn't make it good. I shouldn't be able to accidentally select every widget in an app as though it were text. But with Electron apps, that's just normal.

Slack puts a nicer shade of lipstick on the pig than Teams does, but the lips still belong to the same thing.

> I shouldn't be able to accidentally select every widget in an app as though it were text.

I absolutely should. I hate how many applications have a UI that won't let me copy-paste an error message to search for, much less a menu item; who could possibly have thought that was a good idea?

> Are you under the impression that the placeholder skeletons are there and slow because of React? How would a UI written in C++ get the data quicker from the back end to replace the skeleton with?

Regardless of how, the fact remains that the previous implementation of their UI did fetch and render the data from the backend significantly faster than the current React-based one does.

I’ve been using Spotify for 10+ years, and it’s DEFINITELY faster today than it was when I first used it.

Slack on my machine is currently taking ~1GiB of memory and 3% cpu to do nothing.

My irc client is taking 60MiB of memory and 0.01% cpu. My IRC client is responsive and faster, it has more configurable notification settings. I like the irc client more.

> Bandcamp

I just went to the bandcamp page and it indeed loaded very quickly. As far as I can tell, there's no react in use anywhere so I guess that's why.

What do you mean by bandcamp using react?

> What about Slack, the messenger?

You call it well made? I'm sorry for you, you must really live a really harsh life.

I use localslackirc, so I can be on battery rather long.

On my machine Slack is taking 100MB of memory and 0.1% CPU to do nothing. Maybe we are using different Slack or one of us is lying about the "doing nothing" thing.

It's possible I'm wrong about bandcamp using react but your guess is far from reality as well – react itself does not prevent or discourage loading pages very quickly.

>you must really live a really harsh life.

I do. What are you calling well-made software in your nice enlightened life? Open my eyes.

Never heard anyone complaining either./

compare slack with telegram-desktop for example, which has similar functionalities but is way faster.

>Slack is the best of a bunch of trash options. That doesn't make it good

Well, that's a valid framework too, but by the practical standard of goodness – the best of trash is actually good — because you don't judge goodness against some abstract ideals, but against available choices. Both are valid frameworks, but only one is useful in practice.

It would not be faster without some kind of a tradeoff, so it does use way more RAM.

Slack is a slow and clunky app using well over a gig of RAM, the UI abhors standard MacOS conventions and can’t even use the operating system spelling dictionary.

It’s best in class because everything else is worse. It’s a sad state of affairs.

What are you talking about? It runs on the pinephone.

Try meeting people who use slack?

I do for the past 10 years or so ;)