Well yeah, it's not like how it's packaged changed the underlying design.

If you want a lightweight version of the slack client and don't fell like using the IRC or XMPP bridges you can use Epiphany (or Chromium) to install the website an an 'App'.

I find just pinning the tab (right-click on tab, select Pin Tab) on Firefox does what I need it to do. I mention this because I suspect many people are unaware the feature exists.

Pinning a tab gives it permanent priority on the left-hand side of the tab list, and elides the title from the tab, so it is just the favicon. It also blocks CTRL-w from closing the tab; you have to actually right-click and either unpin or close the tab. That may sound trivial, but was the biggest problem I had running it in the browser before, it got caught in my periodic tab cleanups accidentally. Now I never accidentally close it.

There is also wee-slack[0], a plug-in for weechat specifically that does more than the IRC gateway

[0] https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

eul.im is a closed-source commercial lightweight chat client launched 6 months ago; the author spent a few months advertising on related discussions until snagging a bit of critical feedback. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=eul.im&sort=byDate&type=commen... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597468 (apparently it still downloads a 180MB embedded browser https://github.com/eul-im/eul/issues/60)

There is also https://github.com/bkanber/Slackadaisical (no development since initial October appearance) CLI and:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597508 >nikisweeting: https://github.com/saenzramiro/rambox [...] https://github.com/meetfranz/franz [...] share one Electron instance for all your chat services

Filesize on snapcraft.io is right around 150MB[0]

[0] https://snapcraft.io/slack/

Yup. Fortunately this is not 2010 where that would more than 0.1% of the storage space on your typical machine.

Still dog slow on my 20C/64G box. :/

I can imagine. Then this is probably not the best option for that box. The WebApp, or Emacs-Slack(https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack), or Slackadaisical(https://github.com/bkanber/Slackadaisical) would probably be a better option.

But either way its an option that probably wouldn't exist otherwise.

But you know as well as anyone else that the problem with browser-based apps is that they take hundreds of megabytes of memory. And unfortunately, memory is still scarce (no thanks to Intel for not supporting LP-DDR4 in mobile SKUs).

Meh, LP is nice to have but you can live fairly happily without.

My real beef with electron apps is that they invariably lack support for all sorts of goodies (accented-character menus, OS-specific shortcuts, text auto-expansion, etc etc...) that regular desktop apps just get as standard.