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That’s because Slack runs on top of basically Chrome, which is a horrible battery hog.

If you run the web versions of Electron “apps” in Safari you’ll get substantially better battery life. (Of course, still not perfect; irrespective of browser all of these types of apps are incredibly poorly optimized from a client-side performance perspective.

If large companies making tools like slack had any respect for their users they would ship a dedicated desktop app, and it would support more OS features while using a small fraction of the computing resources.

(Large-company-sponsored web apps seem to be generally getting worse over time. Gmail for example uses several times more CPU/memory/bandwidth than it used to a few years ago, while simultaneously being much glitchier and laggier.)



Yes, Electron is a bit of a battery hog. But the Slack app itself is horrendous. If you read through their API docs and then try to figure out how to recreate the app, you'll see why. The architecture of the API simply does not match the functionality of the app, so there is constant network communication, constant work being done in the background, etc.




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