Turns out they mean "electron is a native application, and our app is a webpage inside of electron, so our webpage is a native application."
Bummer. I use both Slack and Hipchat for different groups, and I'm not happy with the wrapped webapp for either of them.
But there's a difference between saying "I put a webview in my app" and "I put my whole app in a webview". Driving the whole thing from HTML/JS tends to have bad implications for:
• Performance (laggy animation, excessive CPU use, more drain on battery)
• Window management (everything in one box! Modal overlays! Window management is overrated, nobody uses Exposé or multiple windows of one app anyway)
• and UI consistency (some popup menus look one way, right click and every other popup menu on the computer looks another way)
Adium, Textual, and Colloquy use HTML to display things, but they don't try and shove the whole damn app in it.
Every app has to re-invent the wheel here, and there's a lot of native controls that don't exist on HTML.
Generally though, window management is unimportant because these apps tend to be single-windowed apps anyway.
Slack actually does use multiple windows. The sign-in flow (enter organization, enter email address, choose between magic-email or password authentication, enter password) happens in a popup.
What it can't do is pull organizations out into separate windows like Adium or Colloquy. I'm in 3 separate groups on Slack, and sometimes in a conversation in more than one of them simultaneously.
And yeah, I can go open up the second one in my web browser, but it kind of defeats the point of having a "native app" if it's going to be crappier than just going to the website.
The Slack native app for desktop was horrible last year, but right now it's acceptable, apart from annoying notifications polluting the application switcher.
1. is a much more complex application
2. has no perceptible performance issues
3. is also built on Electron
That seems to be the main gripe. Is that true for VSC too (I've never used it)?
if you're curious, download it and open devtools, it's in one of the menus. you get the usual Chrome devtools and you can edit the entire editor.
See my reply to benologist for some reasons that I don't love the HipChat app compared to native group chat alternatives.
For example, Hipchat's settings overlay (https://i.imgur.com/V3UOyMI.png) which should:
• Be a separate window
• Be sized properly for its contents instead of having to scroll
• Use tabs along the top for the settings categories
• Not have clipped left edges on all of the checkboxes
• Put the close button in the top left corner of the window like the rest of the OS
Compare to settings in Textual, which is an actual native application: https://i.imgur.com/5GFURBk.png
Beyond the design aspects, there's also the issue of performance (the OS's UI layout system is well optimized for doing UI layout) and battery impact.
The average "Energy Impact" of Hipchat as measured by Activity Monitor is 24x as high as Textual's. Twenty four! That puts it in 3rd place, beaten only by Google Chrome and Spotify (which IIRC is a similar "wrapped our webapp in CEF or electron). Hipchat does a bit more than Textual (inline image display), but not enough to justify its abuse of my battery life.
EDIT: spelling
Aside from that, non-native applications inevitably introduce accessibility issues and UX incongruencies with the rest of the system that are difficult if not impossible to resolve entirely. There's a huge trade off made when using web tech for desktop applications and developers would do well to deeply consider their choice of technologies before acting.
You'll lose literally hours of battery life simply by running Atom instead of Sublime. It's absurd how little regard Electron devs are showing for end-user resources.
I've had a lack of issues with Slack, but HipChat seemed to have updates every other day and crash a lot when I used it.