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Comment by limelight | Hacker News Reader

> Multiple code bases may be a pain, but they still produce better UIs when you support more than one OS.

I don't know if that's universally true.

Slack uses Electron for its desktop apps, yet has received a lot of acclaim for its UI and seems to be trouncing alternatives with truly native offerings (IRC, HipChat).

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I have always been surprised they get so much UI praise. To me, it feels like the HTML frame that it is, and often confounds my expectations of how a native app works. It is definitely better than its competitors, but that doesn't mean it's all that great. Having said that, it seems like they've wielded the web view approach to achieve a great flexibility and development speed advantage, so it's definitely a valid way of doing things. But I keep waiting for them to switch to full-native now that they're well established and can afford way more developers.

I'd hardly call slack the epitome of usability. It guzzles memory, is laggy on my workstation (Xeon cpu lots of ram and a high end gaming gpu), their search functionality is abysmal too. I quite like slack, but I really wish they would consider a native app, or even just address the performance problems of their chat client.

I do not really understand how Hipchat can be so bad though. The client is ghastly on all platforms and not being able to handle shaky internet connections these days is a joke.

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