> The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper".
I'd argue it's not cheaper overall, just for the company choosing to do the development.
What I mean is, the lost productivity of waiting around for slack to load a channel is essentially outsourcing this cost difference via poor performance.
And yet the market (the users) choose to use Slack over alternatives. If this lost productivity was a problem for the general market, Slack wouldn't have the market share it has.
From what I can see Slack's market share is dwarfed by Teams'[0][1] and similar to Discord's[2]. This is not strictly an argument against your broader point as I believe all these apps are essentially the same in technology stack.
Regardless, it's hard to look at that one feature and determine that conclusion from it. There's a of other pros and cons to be weighed when making any kind of decision like this. I'd suggest hosting, overall UX, and corporate support probably make up far more of the critical success factors for these kinds of apps than their older competitors. The lost productivity and poor performance are the cost of these other features, apparently. Perhaps in the future there will be a new disruptor to the market that will do this same thing but with a fully-native client application that is stabler and more performant than their competitors.
I personally consider IRC (or I guess more precisely, IRC clients like Weechat (Not to be confused with China's WeChat)) a contender, as it provides chat functionality as well as the ability to create channels for themed discussions.
No, it doesn't have emojis or inline multimedia, but IMO it delivers the important part of chat and leaves the unimportant parts for other applications (like opening a hyperlink from IRC chat to see the clever meme someone posted). It also doesn't do video or voice, but there are other applications for that as well. For purely text chat, IRC is a lightweight (and self-hostable FOSS) solution.
>What I mean is, the lost productivity of waiting around for slack to load a channel is essentially outsourcing this cost difference via poor performance.
What makes you think that Slack's loading times is due to Electron, not shitty backend?
If it were the backend, I would not expect the load times to improve when loading Slack into a browser tab where its resources are constrained.
Separately, if it were strictly a Slack problem and not Electron, you wouldn't expect to see these kinds of issues crop up across the spectrum of Electron apps. Scroll through this thread and you can see a variety of people running into these problems in all kinds of different electron-based apps:
I'd argue it's not cheaper overall, just for the company choosing to do the development.
What I mean is, the lost productivity of waiting around for slack to load a channel is essentially outsourcing this cost difference via poor performance.