Nonsense. The optimization they are referring to is not premature in any sense of the word. If anything, it's belated and overdue.

In any case, the originator of the phrase, Knuth, specifically said that it related to "small efficiencies".

Nobody would call Electron's efficiencies that need to be addressed, "small".

There's a good discussion here: http://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization

Spotify, Slack and Atom are no longer hip startups though - they're established applications, and at least two of them have a very lucrative monthly subscription model. They can afford to optimize.

But the user experience is already great, so what's the gain? Electron and the web clearly make a first class app platform on desktop.

EDIT: thanks for the downvotes. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how electron is keeping Slack and Spotify from building a massive business and how their desktop users find the experience so bad they don't use the tools obsessively. Clearly there are things to improve w/ Electron (energy usage), but "terrible experience" is not how I'd describe Spotify and Slack on desktop, and their businesses clearly reflect that.

Moving to a native stack has major tradeoffs, would it 10x their business at least? I strongly believe that answer is "no."

Its a terrible experience to discover my battery life is cut in half because of a cursor animation in VS Code, or to have my laptop heat up and the fans engage because of an animated GIF in slack.

But its worse than that - most users don't even know why their battery life is awful. So they blame apple, or microsoft, or dell or whoever. And they just don't use their computers as much, because its all a bit gross and slow. And thats bad news for our entire industry.

Hasn't it already been pointed out a thousand times now that this was just a bug in Chrome that has been fixed right away?

Sorry, I'm confused. Which part of this bad performance was a bug in chrome? The peaking up to 100% usage for a few hours? The shockingly bad performance rendering GIFs? The super high idle CPU usage? The high download size and ram usage?

I used the desktop slack client all of last year, and these kind of problems were present the whole time. This isn't some "oh, yeah there was some particularly egregious bug we shipped accidentally in October" thing. Whatever is making the slack client a bloated ball of crap is much worse than a simple, quickly fixed chrome bug. Its endemic.

A bug that it's a lot more easy to be discovered and fixed when it affects so many people, How many "native" apps have similar battery hogging bugs that are not fixed because nobody founds about them?

As a paying customer, both Spotify and Slack are relativity shitty experiences.

I pay for both despite their poor quality software and bad UI/UX, not because of it.

Anecdotally, I had to cancel spotify due to shitty experience. One of their app updates on my phone left it completely draining my battery in a few hours even when not using the app, with no way to keep it from running in the background other than to uninstall. (ok or possibly rooting my phone to install more recent android with better background process control)

I pay for Spotify but I don't see it's poor UI/UX problems. The sections make sense, the color contrast is good, browsing through an artists albums and songs makes sense, the playback functions bind perfectly to the media buttons on my physical keyboard. What else could I want?

The user experience of Slack as a desktop app is not great. The UI is consistently one of the highest energy users on my machine, despite being one of the worst performing (have you ever tried scrolling up into a conversation's history?)

Scrolling up involves network calls, so clearly it's going to be slower. Energy usage is definitely an area of improvement.

i can easily scroll 10k lines in mIRC no problem

What advantages does the user receive for running the Slack Electron app, as opposed to having the site open in a browser tab?

None that I can think of, really. This is one of the cases where a desktop version of a web app exists and I'm not aware of why.

Spotify makes sense as it can reliably use your file system for storage and thus download songs so you're making fewer network requests. Perhaps Slack could keep a short log to prevent "scrolling up"-related network requests?

Choosing a platform isn't really premature optimization -- if you base your project on electron, and electron is too slow, your alternative is to... rewrite your project?