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Well, the native Slack app is just an Electron wrapper around their web app, as far as I can tell. The performance feels roughly the same for both web and desktop.

The main reason I kept the desktop app, is so that I don't need to "download" the app every time my browser's cached copy is invalidated or expires. But being able to start the app with a couple keystrokes from my OS's quick launch menu is also nice.

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Interesting. So you're saying that it really 'spins the fans' when you run slack as a pure web app as well? It seems quite lightweight to me, on latest chrome in Ubuntu on a late 2016 macbook pro.

Just tested again. Performance is good when idling, but while loading content in a heavy channel, scrolling gets laggy and one CPU plateaus for a while. Maybe the app is inserting DOM nodes individually, in a loop?

I guess it's too early for me to evaluate the performance of Twist, because I am not on any large teams there. But I can see that Slack at least, has room for improvement in rendering performance. Perhaps there is some general optimization they are missing out on, like immutable state + shouldComponentUpdate. That one saved a flailing app of mine in the past.

I'm in Firefox on Linux, i7-4500U, 8GB ram.

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