7 ms·

Slack: Other browsers require significant effort so we're focused on Chrome

102 points by dustinmoris 9y ago

nikanj 9y ago
They raised quarter a billion(!) last summer. What on earth are they doing with that money. Building web-based chat apps should not be that capital intensive https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/slack-is-raising-a-250-million-round-at-5-billion-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/slack-is-raising-a-250-mil...
- weberc2 9y ago
  Making web-based chat apps isn't an end to itself. If the company can't profit from a FF chat app then they won't make one.
  - product50 9y ago
    Contrary to popular expectations not everything is about profits. Better user experience trumps $$ since once users are there, money will come in - it is literally Slack's business model where they charge for each new user. Also, while people may feel frustrated about Firefox, I bet they have data showing that users are willing to switch to Chrome for Slack chat or calls when push comes to shove. Otherwise, you bet they would have prioritized this. Data driven development is all about making these kind of tradeoffs.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      What is the difference is between "profits" and "money coming in"?
      - solarkraft 9y ago
        The money you spend in the process.
        weberc2 9y ago
        Presumably the OP meant something else or he is contradicting himself.
      - product50 9y ago
        Don't go on a tangent. The main point which I am making is that better user experience trumps everything. As we have seen time and again, once users love your product money will get figured out. This is starkly different from your opinion above where all you care about is money and why ff doesn't fit into that narrative. Strong companies don't operate or think like that.
        weberc2 9y ago
        The tangent was yours. You set "profit" against "UX" and used "the ability of UX to generate money" as the rationale. From a corporate perspective, "UX" is a tool to generate profit, nothing more. To get things back on track, Slack feels that supporting video chat for FF is not the most profitable thing it could do with its money factoring in the profit derived from the improved UX. This is different than "they have a quarter of a billion of dollars in investment and they think that's not enough to build voice chat for FF", which is the implication of the post to which I originally responded. Slack's purpose is to make money, not to "build as many video chat apps for as many platforms as possible"--modulo corruption or incompetence, it will only build clients for new platforms if the opportunity value is higher than the value of other opportunities. Now, if you think that Slack's assessment is wrong and building a FF video chat app is the most profitable thing they could possibly do with their investment, then that's another conversation. I'm going to assume the people who operate the business, who have troves of information about the company and its opportunities, and who are deeply invested in its success are many times more likely than you or I (random Internet strangers) to know where the best opportunities lie, but that's still a separate conversation.
    - rorykoehler 9y ago
      Video chat doesn't even work in their installed app
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Reinvesting into ecosystem startups is one. Salesofrce does this too fwiw.
- Afforess 9y ago
  I'm curious why more money equals faster or better software engineering. Didn't we collectively learn from the Mythical Man Month and others that throwing people at a software problem doesn't scale? More engineers on a project increases communication and administrative overhead; the additional overhead and context costs quickly exceeds any productivity gained. Given this: Why would more money scale, when people - presumably the thing the money would pay for - has already been shown not to scale?
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    That applies to a single project and a single team. With much less than a quarter billion dollars you could spin off new companies, "Slack Calls For Firefox Inc." and "Slack Calls For Edge Inc." each with it's own development team dedicated to supporting a given browser, and still not break the bank. It's just a business choice. It's not they can't, do just don't feel it's worth it.
  - godzillabrennus 9y ago
    It shouldn’t be hard to document their API’s and then build a unique team to develop a front end for each browser. With $250M in funding and three major browsers I think it’s reasonable they could support them all that way.
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    Apparently they have a really good communications tool.
  - convolvatron 9y ago
    one would hope that if you had skilled upper management sitting on 1B they would be able to invest that in both good engineers, and good builders of teams. and if those people weren't able to be effective to be able to track that and take appropriate action (again, with that giant financial lever). the screwy part is that effective upper manager needs to have a deep and intuitive notion about software development organizations in order to be able to evaluate statements coming out of software effectively. but thats alot to ask, so they hire a vp eng with a nice sounding resume. that person turns out to not be very effective, and they translate their lack of discernment into a tier of equally useless middle managers. and if by accident a effective engineer gets hired they are completely unable to change things for the better because all the useless padding drowns out their voice. everyone big company says that they have the resources of a big company but the tactical flexibility and empowerment of a small one. imagine what would you could accomplish were that to be true.
- mping 9y ago
  I bet they are using the money to strengthen their position, with marketing and enterprise penetration through integrations, etc. screenhero acquisition is an example.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    If their screenhero acquisition and subsequent integration is any indication of how they're spending their money, color me unimpressed. edit What I mean is Slack ruined screenhero, which was amazing before they bought it. Slack's screen sharing is among the worst screen sharing tools I've ever used. It is beyond broken. It uses a massive amount of memory and cpu cycles while being too laggy to use for basic text editing. I actively hate it.
    - t0mbstone 9y ago
      Yep. It is literally the worst screen sharing tool I've ever used. Screenhero used to be amazing. My whole team would use it for pair programming. Now, we've literally had to resort to using Teamviewer, because Slack is so bad.
      - jamie_ca 9y ago
        Yeah, we pay for Slack for chat and 1:1 voice/video, but all our group meetings at work are using Zoom. Far better experience, and the video quality has been great. Have had a few instances recently where people couldn't join the call and had to re-create the meeting, though.
    - mping 9y ago
      I concur, SH used to be so much better; I think they acquired them to get a foot on the screenshare thing. Took them long enough, by the way.
      - ch4s3 9y ago
        Yeah, over a year and they really fumble the opportunity. I'm still looking for a good SH replacement.
- tejasmanohar 9y ago
  Building an ecosystem. Slack's a business-- not some initiative to build cross-browser web apps. There's a lot to prioritize. When is the last time you've heard a company avoid Slack due to poor browser support?
iaw 9y ago
Funny thing is I am aware of another product from a better funded company that doesn't support video chat outside of Chrome... I am not sure if this is a problem with Slack's attitude or if it's that the overhead for creating a voice/video chat app in browsers besides Chrome is much more substantial... Has anyone tried to implement a web based video chat in Firefox before? Is it really that challenging?
- jcelerier 9y ago
  meet.jit.si works fine in firefox
andygcook 9y ago
There's more context if you scroll down in the thread. In my opinion, they should try to support more browsers sooner and build on standards, but I do understand starting with the browser that has the biggest market share to prove out the feature, then expanding from there. --- "We're afraid our first response may have come off a little more limiting that we meant it — we're focusing on Chrome for our calls support specifically, but that does not mean we have no plans to expand to other browsers in the future!" --- "Apologies — our initial tweet wasn't as clear as it could have been. We didn't mean to imply that future support for other browsers is off the cards, just that it's not on the cards right now."
- dustinmoris 9y ago
  > We didn't mean to imply that future support for other browsers is off the cards, just that it's not on the cards right now If something is not on the cards RIGHT NOW then it doesn't mean "we released this feature on Chrome first and the rest is following", it means "we don't believe in cross browser support (=diversity) unless enough people scream loud enough". A very web damaging attitude in my opinion.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    "we don't believe in [foo] unless enough people scream loud enough" Every piece of advice about how to build products gives this exact advice. Why is it not applicable to Slack? Because of their funding amounts? Again, this is a genuine question, why is the case of slack different than any other company?
Talyen42 9y ago
More Money != Faster Development
ikonst 9y ago
WebRTC is somewhat new and complex, and browser support varies greatly. I don't know what kind of unlimited resources behemoth you imagine Slack to be, but I can definitely see how doing consistently working cross-browser WebRTC would be too much effort to be able to pull off at a given time.
- zoul 9y ago
  $250M sounds pretty behemotish?
  - ikonst 9y ago
    Maybe not for the operation they're running, of which VoIP is only a small part.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  This is apparently largely because Chrome's implementation of WebRTC has been less standards compliant than that of Firefox. See https://twitter.com/adambroach/status/959298097674305537 https://twitter.com/adambroach/status/959298097674305537 (by one of the WebRTC developers).
txsh 9y ago
Why should they support browsers that make dramatic, arbitrary changes on a whim? Chrome is the only browser that remains stable. Who knows what Firefox or Edge will look like next year?
- pcwalton 9y ago
  What does "stable" mean here? Chrome, Firefox, and Edge all take Web compatibility extremely seriously. They would not break Slack.
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  Look like? In what way does the interface of a browser changing make it more challenging to support as a website? Firefox looks a bit different now to a year ago with Quantum etc, and add-ons are very different, but I can't think of a single website that would be affected by those changes. Can you elaborate on what you're getting at here?
- yladiz 9y ago
  Do you have proof that Chrome is the only "stable" browser? Is your standard for stability Chrome, meaning that by definition Chrome is stable and other browsers aren't if they aren't exactly like Chrome?
- jimjimjim 9y ago
  Why not have the whole world stay on ie? Nothing ever changed there!
pcwalton 9y ago
Folks often ask "what's the problem, why not just have Blink be the only browser engine?" One important reason is that there's a lot of innovation that happens outside of Blink that will not happen inside Blink. Blink shows no sign of permitting Rust components such as the parallel restyling engine that Gecko uses. Another issue is that Blink is not designed to be embeddable in other browsers like Safari. The friction of having to maintain multiple "ports" in one codebase was much of the reason for the WebKit/Blink fork to begin with.
- dictum 9y ago
  This is an opportune moment for me to say thank you to everyone at Mozilla for maintaining and improving Gecko. That there's a browser as good as the current Firefox is another reason to not lock ourselves into a Blink monoculture. Of course, even if FF was in a bad state we should try to avoid de-facto standardization of Chrome, but with FF improving with each version, there's a practical, sellable argument for diversity.
weberc2 9y ago
This is a bogus headline. They can't justify the cost of developing video chat for other browsers. The truth is much less interesting than the misleading implications. NOTE: I posted this comment before the title was corrected by the mods for editorializing.
jpalomaki 9y ago
”It requires significant effort for us to build out support and triage issues on each browser, so we're focused on providing a great experience in Chrome and our desktop apps. ” They are not saying they can’t afford it. Money they have, engineering talent tends to be always on short supply. You need to think where you put the effort.
matchbok 9y ago
Another reason to dump this fad. I've been using slack for my jobs for years, and it wastes more time than saves. No real work gets done in a chat room, which is what slack is. It's a shame a private, bad experience is so popular now. Try search for a conversation with someone in a channel about topic X. You can't do it, because there is no context. Search for the keyword or person? Good luck with that. Even then, if you find it, it just scrolls you to that spot, which is terrible UI. Ugh.
- iamdave 9y ago
  Are our Slack versions different? I use both desktop and browser depending on what machine I'm on at the time, and searching for text snippets or just keywords brings up a side panel with search results and messages in context of when they happened, along with a link that will let me scroll if I chose to the moment in time it happened. The UX you describe is one I haven't seen in Slack since very early releases.
  - matchbok 9y ago
    Yeah, that's my problem. The tiny sidebar is not a great UX. The core problem, I think, is the lack of real threading options. Conversations never really start or end in a chat room, so even if you find the keyword you are looking for, find the start and end of that conversation is very difficult. Mainly because it's usually interspersed with tons of other chats in the channel. I guess you could make tons of channels, but that that bogs you down in having to check them all for stuff you actually care about. :/
    - iamdave 9y ago
      I'm sorry if this sounds snarky but a lot of your criticisms of slack so far just don't seem rooted in anything resembling the recency of development within the platform. https://slackhq.com/threaded-messaging-comes-to-slack-417ffba054bd https://slackhq.com/threaded-messaging-comes-to-slack-417ffb... Threaded conversations have been supported for a full year now, you have the ability to specify and narrow your searches down to specific rooms by using "in:#general" or by conversation by using "in:@dave", but a plain search will search as best the application can public rooms, private rooms and private messages, and the application does a great job I think telling you exactly where the search results come from, when they happened along with a contextual view of the conversation that happened before and after the search results-giving you the precise context of what was talked about, and allow you to both jump back in time to the moment the keyword appears, and jump back to "Now" very easily. https://slackhq.com/next-level-searching-in-slack-1ce56aa8adee https://slackhq.com/next-level-searching-in-slack-1ce56aa8ad... Again, sorry if this sounds snarky, but I don't think your critiques are really lined up with how Slack has been developed in the last year. Many of your problems have been directly solved.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Reminder: IRC works on literally everything, uses kilobytes rather than gigabytes of RAM, and is a widly supported open protocol with many competing implementations.
- lostmsu 9y ago
  Does it have push notifications and mobile client with full text search across the public/company wide chat history with access control?
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    There is also email and mailing lists which have those things. IRC can also have public logging and full text search in a universal client called a web browser.
    - lostmsu 9y ago
      Mailing lists on their own do not provide ACLs, and the only way to read existing private topic is for somebody to forward you all the messages. Are there existing nodes, that do that automatically for you?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Yep.
    - lostmsu 9y ago
      Yeah? What is the client and the server?
  - mixedCase 9y ago
    And just to prevent the inevitable allow me to add: "...and that is trivial to set-up and use for most people".
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  IRC DCC doesn’t work behind a NAT. No voice, video or screen-sharing. No message search feature. Advocating IRC over Slack is analogous to arguing we should be using Gopher instead of WWW because of ActiveX.
SkyPuncher 9y ago
I don't think this is an issue specific to Slack. It seems like the trend with nearly all real-time video/voice software. You either use chrome or get the desktop app.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
  You raise a good point. This conversation would benefit from someone articulating what particular issues are making it hard to support certain features in other browsers.
akerro 9y ago
Our company recently started using Chime [1] it supports Chrome, Firefox and afair Edge, it's quite pleasant to use for video-audio chats in a browser. It uses WSS and WebRTC so it works behind NAT where SIP can't, also it looks like it's a P2P technology so your voice and video traffic doesn't go to central server (I might be wrong about it). [1] https://www.justchimein.com/en/ https://www.justchimein.com/en/
- Corrado 9y ago
  At first I thought you were talking about the Amazon service. It turns out that Amazon has a voice chat service called Chime as well, though it's more narrow of focus than the CafeX system that you are using.
jimjimjim 9y ago
Which do i hate more, slack or web apps limited to certain browsers? Now i don't need to choose.
leothekim 9y ago
Why is this important? There are standalone clients for Slack available on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  Because the standalone client uses Electron and eats up battery life, CPU, and memory like cheap sushi.
jimjimjim 9y ago
Yagni is making the world worse.
atarian 9y ago
My takeaway from this is that you can build a billion dollar company by only supporting a single browser.
chrisweekly 9y ago
Given Slack's desktop app is Electron-based, and the electron renderer is ~chrome [note the tilde!], they may be effectively developing for [web + MacOS + Windows + Linux] without bothering with any other browsers.
kuon 9y ago
I could push for another discussion medium at my company, but the thing is that I'm connected to a lot of FOSS slacks (elixir, elm, postgresql...). I don't want to give more GB of rams to another client that I'll have to run in //. I still have my irssi in a tmux terminal when I need it, but it's not a UI I can push over to my teammate (not mentioning the lack of voice call). Slack somehow did a great job at solving "something", I'm not sure if it was the lack of communication or something else. Sadly, it's taking more and more RAM and stance like not supporting non Chrome makes me even less comfortable using it.
- progval 9y ago
  > I still have my irssi in a tmux terminal when I need it, but it's not a UI I can push over to my teammate What about IRCCloud?
  - benwilber0 9y ago
    Love and use IRCCloud everyday. Well worth the $5 or whatever to have a truly great IRC client in browser (and it's by far the best on Android). People still ask me why I pay for IRC because it just sounds crazy given the glut of high-quality free software IRC clients but my answer is always just that it's the best and since I spend a lot of my time in IRC I prefer to just pay for the best software/experience.
  - kuon 9y ago
    Users are very attached to avatars, which IRCCloud was lacking last time I checked. Also I don't know if modern IRC supports audio/video calls. Thinking about it, screensharing is becoming more and more important too. We still use teamviewer, I didn't want to move to slack built in screen sharing in fear of vendor lock-in (we had teamviewer for so long, if we move out, I'd like something a bit more open).
michaelmrose 9y ago
So how much money did google float them for exclusive features. For me it recalls when skype limited the number of participants in calls if you used an AMD processor or limited the resolution unless you purchased specific webcams from partners.
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  I doubt it. They're built on Electron, they get Chrome support free and probably just don't want to spend any resources on making it work in other browsers because most of their users use the native apps.
bdz 9y ago
We started using Discord and we really like it. It is targeted towards gaming communities (basically to replace TS3, Ventrilo, Mumble etc) but I think it's comparable to Slack too
thriftwy 9y ago
But so is Hangouts which is a much larger issue IMO, as it doesn't have a desktop client (does it?)
dang 9y ago
The submitted title, "Slack can't afford to support browsers other than Chrome", broke the HN guidelines by editorializing. The text says nothing about not being able to afford. It may sound the same if you don't look closely, but please do look closely, because even tiny distortions in titles can have large effects on HN discussion. If you need to paraphrase a title to make it fit, or change it because the original was misleading or linkbait (as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks), do it by finding the most representative language in the text itself.
- dustinmoris 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out to me!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mful 9y ago
I'm getting a little sick of the level of entitlement in tech conversations — every firm must adhere perfectly to some set ideals or else the most vocal members in the community turn the conversation into an end-of-the-internet melodrama. We laud companies that start by doing something small well, yet the second they don't support our platform of choice, it's time to banish them to the hills. (In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?) We preach focus, then act appalled when customization feature X stagnates on the backlog. We castigate businesses that spend investor dollars frivolously, and are then furious when well-funded companies act frugally and choose to make tradeoffs (like, say, only supporting one browser for a feature that doesn't work the same on all browsers, until they can achieve a certain quality threshold.) I look forward to the day when we collectively accept that companies are groups of humans generally working in earnest to do their best, not some faceless behemoth that responds only to screaming "you're awful, do my feature or I'm leaving and tweeting about it" like some petulant child. Maybe there are cases where that is a reasonable response, but when the volume is always turned up to 11 it's hard to tell the real crises from distractions.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  I'm getting a little sick of the level of entitlement in tech conversations I'd argue it's gotten worse over the last few years, to the point that even questioning the attitude or bringing it up in conversation is frowned upon and heavily argued against.
- gumby 9y ago
  I disagree. If we let little monocultures exist they grow into big monocultures (Windows "monopoly", Facebook "monopoly" etc). I put "monopoly" in scare quotes because they had the de facto high ground rather than being monopolies in the Standard Oil sense.
  - qbaqbaqba 9y ago
    What about Slack "monopoly"?
solomatov 9y ago
I remember similar conversation from long ago times, but instead of chrome we had IE6.
zkomp 9y ago
Sigh. Slackers gonna be slacking. Why are we regressing back to the horrible world of vendor lock in and single browser sites. Chrome is the new IE6?
olliej 9y ago
This is literally the exact argument people made when only supporting IE6 (and remember at that point in history IE was arguably the best browser, warts and all)
scarface74 9y ago
If Slack is "focusing their efforts" on their battery draining, slow, badly written excuse for a desktop app. I can't tell.

102 points by dustinmoris 9y ago

They raised quarter a billion(!) last summer. What on earth are they doing with that money. Building web-based chat apps should not be that capital intensive https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/slack-is-raising-a-250-million-round-at-5-billion-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/26/slack-is-raising-a-250-mil...

weberc2 9y ago
Making web-based chat apps isn't an end to itself. If the company can't profit from a FF chat app then they won't make one.
- product50 9y ago
  Contrary to popular expectations not everything is about profits. Better user experience trumps $$ since once users are there, money will come in - it is literally Slack's business model where they charge for each new user. Also, while people may feel frustrated about Firefox, I bet they have data showing that users are willing to switch to Chrome for Slack chat or calls when push comes to shove. Otherwise, you bet they would have prioritized this. Data driven development is all about making these kind of tradeoffs.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    What is the difference is between "profits" and "money coming in"?
    - solarkraft 9y ago
      The money you spend in the process.
      - weberc2 9y ago
        Presumably the OP meant something else or he is contradicting himself.
    - product50 9y ago
      Don't go on a tangent. The main point which I am making is that better user experience trumps everything. As we have seen time and again, once users love your product money will get figured out. This is starkly different from your opinion above where all you care about is money and why ff doesn't fit into that narrative. Strong companies don't operate or think like that.
      - weberc2 9y ago
        The tangent was yours. You set "profit" against "UX" and used "the ability of UX to generate money" as the rationale. From a corporate perspective, "UX" is a tool to generate profit, nothing more. To get things back on track, Slack feels that supporting video chat for FF is not the most profitable thing it could do with its money factoring in the profit derived from the improved UX. This is different than "they have a quarter of a billion of dollars in investment and they think that's not enough to build voice chat for FF", which is the implication of the post to which I originally responded. Slack's purpose is to make money, not to "build as many video chat apps for as many platforms as possible"--modulo corruption or incompetence, it will only build clients for new platforms if the opportunity value is higher than the value of other opportunities. Now, if you think that Slack's assessment is wrong and building a FF video chat app is the most profitable thing they could possibly do with their investment, then that's another conversation. I'm going to assume the people who operate the business, who have troves of information about the company and its opportunities, and who are deeply invested in its success are many times more likely than you or I (random Internet strangers) to know where the best opportunities lie, but that's still a separate conversation.
  - rorykoehler 9y ago
    Video chat doesn't even work in their installed app
hkmurakami 9y ago
Reinvesting into ecosystem startups is one. Salesofrce does this too fwiw.
Afforess 9y ago
I'm curious why more money equals faster or better software engineering. Didn't we collectively learn from the Mythical Man Month and others that throwing people at a software problem doesn't scale? More engineers on a project increases communication and administrative overhead; the additional overhead and context costs quickly exceeds any productivity gained. Given this: Why would more money scale, when people - presumably the thing the money would pay for - has already been shown not to scale?
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  That applies to a single project and a single team. With much less than a quarter billion dollars you could spin off new companies, "Slack Calls For Firefox Inc." and "Slack Calls For Edge Inc." each with it's own development team dedicated to supporting a given browser, and still not break the bank. It's just a business choice. It's not they can't, do just don't feel it's worth it.
- godzillabrennus 9y ago
  It shouldn’t be hard to document their API’s and then build a unique team to develop a front end for each browser. With $250M in funding and three major browsers I think it’s reasonable they could support them all that way.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  Apparently they have a really good communications tool.
- convolvatron 9y ago
  one would hope that if you had skilled upper management sitting on 1B they would be able to invest that in both good engineers, and good builders of teams. and if those people weren't able to be effective to be able to track that and take appropriate action (again, with that giant financial lever). the screwy part is that effective upper manager needs to have a deep and intuitive notion about software development organizations in order to be able to evaluate statements coming out of software effectively. but thats alot to ask, so they hire a vp eng with a nice sounding resume. that person turns out to not be very effective, and they translate their lack of discernment into a tier of equally useless middle managers. and if by accident a effective engineer gets hired they are completely unable to change things for the better because all the useless padding drowns out their voice. everyone big company says that they have the resources of a big company but the tactical flexibility and empowerment of a small one. imagine what would you could accomplish were that to be true.
mping 9y ago
I bet they are using the money to strengthen their position, with marketing and enterprise penetration through integrations, etc. screenhero acquisition is an example.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  If their screenhero acquisition and subsequent integration is any indication of how they're spending their money, color me unimpressed. edit What I mean is Slack ruined screenhero, which was amazing before they bought it. Slack's screen sharing is among the worst screen sharing tools I've ever used. It is beyond broken. It uses a massive amount of memory and cpu cycles while being too laggy to use for basic text editing. I actively hate it.
  - t0mbstone 9y ago
    Yep. It is literally the worst screen sharing tool I've ever used. Screenhero used to be amazing. My whole team would use it for pair programming. Now, we've literally had to resort to using Teamviewer, because Slack is so bad.
    - jamie_ca 9y ago
      Yeah, we pay for Slack for chat and 1:1 voice/video, but all our group meetings at work are using Zoom. Far better experience, and the video quality has been great. Have had a few instances recently where people couldn't join the call and had to re-create the meeting, though.
  - mping 9y ago
    I concur, SH used to be so much better; I think they acquired them to get a foot on the screenshare thing. Took them long enough, by the way.
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      Yeah, over a year and they really fumble the opportunity. I'm still looking for a good SH replacement.
tejasmanohar 9y ago
Building an ecosystem. Slack's a business-- not some initiative to build cross-browser web apps. There's a lot to prioritize. When is the last time you've heard a company avoid Slack due to poor browser support?

iaw 9y ago

Funny thing is I am aware of another product from a better funded company that doesn't support video chat outside of Chrome... I am not sure if this is a problem with Slack's attitude or if it's that the overhead for creating a voice/video chat app in browsers besides Chrome is much more substantial... Has anyone tried to implement a web based video chat in Firefox before? Is it really that challenging?

jcelerier 9y ago
meet.jit.si works fine in firefox

andygcook 9y ago

There's more context if you scroll down in the thread. In my opinion, they should try to support more browsers sooner and build on standards, but I do understand starting with the browser that has the biggest market share to prove out the feature, then expanding from there. --- "We're afraid our first response may have come off a little more limiting that we meant it — we're focusing on Chrome for our calls support specifically, but that does not mean we have no plans to expand to other browsers in the future!" --- "Apologies — our initial tweet wasn't as clear as it could have been. We didn't mean to imply that future support for other browsers is off the cards, just that it's not on the cards right now."

dustinmoris 9y ago
> We didn't mean to imply that future support for other browsers is off the cards, just that it's not on the cards right now If something is not on the cards RIGHT NOW then it doesn't mean "we released this feature on Chrome first and the rest is following", it means "we don't believe in cross browser support (=diversity) unless enough people scream loud enough". A very web damaging attitude in my opinion.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  "we don't believe in [foo] unless enough people scream loud enough" Every piece of advice about how to build products gives this exact advice. Why is it not applicable to Slack? Because of their funding amounts? Again, this is a genuine question, why is the case of slack different than any other company?

Talyen42 9y ago

More Money != Faster Development

ikonst 9y ago

WebRTC is somewhat new and complex, and browser support varies greatly. I don't know what kind of unlimited resources behemoth you imagine Slack to be, but I can definitely see how doing consistently working cross-browser WebRTC would be too much effort to be able to pull off at a given time.

zoul 9y ago
$250M sounds pretty behemotish?
- ikonst 9y ago
  Maybe not for the operation they're running, of which VoIP is only a small part.
pcwalton 9y ago
This is apparently largely because Chrome's implementation of WebRTC has been less standards compliant than that of Firefox. See https://twitter.com/adambroach/status/959298097674305537 https://twitter.com/adambroach/status/959298097674305537 (by one of the WebRTC developers).

txsh 9y ago

Why should they support browsers that make dramatic, arbitrary changes on a whim? Chrome is the only browser that remains stable. Who knows what Firefox or Edge will look like next year?

pcwalton 9y ago
What does "stable" mean here? Chrome, Firefox, and Edge all take Web compatibility extremely seriously. They would not break Slack.
mcintyre1994 9y ago
Look like? In what way does the interface of a browser changing make it more challenging to support as a website? Firefox looks a bit different now to a year ago with Quantum etc, and add-ons are very different, but I can't think of a single website that would be affected by those changes. Can you elaborate on what you're getting at here?
yladiz 9y ago
Do you have proof that Chrome is the only "stable" browser? Is your standard for stability Chrome, meaning that by definition Chrome is stable and other browsers aren't if they aren't exactly like Chrome?
jimjimjim 9y ago
Why not have the whole world stay on ie? Nothing ever changed there!

pcwalton 9y ago

Folks often ask "what's the problem, why not just have Blink be the only browser engine?" One important reason is that there's a lot of innovation that happens outside of Blink that will not happen inside Blink. Blink shows no sign of permitting Rust components such as the parallel restyling engine that Gecko uses. Another issue is that Blink is not designed to be embeddable in other browsers like Safari. The friction of having to maintain multiple "ports" in one codebase was much of the reason for the WebKit/Blink fork to begin with.

dictum 9y ago
This is an opportune moment for me to say thank you to everyone at Mozilla for maintaining and improving Gecko. That there's a browser as good as the current Firefox is another reason to not lock ourselves into a Blink monoculture. Of course, even if FF was in a bad state we should try to avoid de-facto standardization of Chrome, but with FF improving with each version, there's a practical, sellable argument for diversity.

weberc2 9y ago

This is a bogus headline. They can't justify the cost of developing video chat for other browsers. The truth is much less interesting than the misleading implications. NOTE: I posted this comment before the title was corrected by the mods for editorializing.

jpalomaki 9y ago

”It requires significant effort for us to build out support and triage issues on each browser, so we're focused on providing a great experience in Chrome and our desktop apps. ” They are not saying they can’t afford it. Money they have, engineering talent tends to be always on short supply. You need to think where you put the effort.

matchbok 9y ago

Another reason to dump this fad. I've been using slack for my jobs for years, and it wastes more time than saves. No real work gets done in a chat room, which is what slack is. It's a shame a private, bad experience is so popular now. Try search for a conversation with someone in a channel about topic X. You can't do it, because there is no context. Search for the keyword or person? Good luck with that. Even then, if you find it, it just scrolls you to that spot, which is terrible UI. Ugh.

iamdave 9y ago
Are our Slack versions different? I use both desktop and browser depending on what machine I'm on at the time, and searching for text snippets or just keywords brings up a side panel with search results and messages in context of when they happened, along with a link that will let me scroll if I chose to the moment in time it happened. The UX you describe is one I haven't seen in Slack since very early releases.
- matchbok 9y ago
  Yeah, that's my problem. The tiny sidebar is not a great UX. The core problem, I think, is the lack of real threading options. Conversations never really start or end in a chat room, so even if you find the keyword you are looking for, find the start and end of that conversation is very difficult. Mainly because it's usually interspersed with tons of other chats in the channel. I guess you could make tons of channels, but that that bogs you down in having to check them all for stuff you actually care about. :/
  - iamdave 9y ago
    I'm sorry if this sounds snarky but a lot of your criticisms of slack so far just don't seem rooted in anything resembling the recency of development within the platform. https://slackhq.com/threaded-messaging-comes-to-slack-417ffba054bd https://slackhq.com/threaded-messaging-comes-to-slack-417ffb... Threaded conversations have been supported for a full year now, you have the ability to specify and narrow your searches down to specific rooms by using "in:#general" or by conversation by using "in:@dave", but a plain search will search as best the application can public rooms, private rooms and private messages, and the application does a great job I think telling you exactly where the search results come from, when they happened along with a contextual view of the conversation that happened before and after the search results-giving you the precise context of what was talked about, and allow you to both jump back in time to the moment the keyword appears, and jump back to "Now" very easily. https://slackhq.com/next-level-searching-in-slack-1ce56aa8adee https://slackhq.com/next-level-searching-in-slack-1ce56aa8ad... Again, sorry if this sounds snarky, but I don't think your critiques are really lined up with how Slack has been developed in the last year. Many of your problems have been directly solved.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Reminder: IRC works on literally everything, uses kilobytes rather than gigabytes of RAM, and is a widly supported open protocol with many competing implementations.

lostmsu 9y ago
Does it have push notifications and mobile client with full text search across the public/company wide chat history with access control?
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  There is also email and mailing lists which have those things. IRC can also have public logging and full text search in a universal client called a web browser.
  - lostmsu 9y ago
    Mailing lists on their own do not provide ACLs, and the only way to read existing private topic is for somebody to forward you all the messages. Are there existing nodes, that do that automatically for you?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Yep.
  - lostmsu 9y ago
    Yeah? What is the client and the server?
- mixedCase 9y ago
  And just to prevent the inevitable allow me to add: "...and that is trivial to set-up and use for most people".
DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
IRC DCC doesn’t work behind a NAT. No voice, video or screen-sharing. No message search feature. Advocating IRC over Slack is analogous to arguing we should be using Gopher instead of WWW because of ActiveX.

SkyPuncher 9y ago

I don't think this is an issue specific to Slack. It seems like the trend with nearly all real-time video/voice software. You either use chrome or get the desktop app.

DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
You raise a good point. This conversation would benefit from someone articulating what particular issues are making it hard to support certain features in other browsers.

akerro 9y ago

Our company recently started using Chime [1] it supports Chrome, Firefox and afair Edge, it's quite pleasant to use for video-audio chats in a browser. It uses WSS and WebRTC so it works behind NAT where SIP can't, also it looks like it's a P2P technology so your voice and video traffic doesn't go to central server (I might be wrong about it). [1] https://www.justchimein.com/en/ https://www.justchimein.com/en/

Corrado 9y ago
At first I thought you were talking about the Amazon service. It turns out that Amazon has a voice chat service called Chime as well, though it's more narrow of focus than the CafeX system that you are using.

jimjimjim 9y ago

Which do i hate more, slack or web apps limited to certain browsers? Now i don't need to choose.

leothekim 9y ago

Why is this important? There are standalone clients for Slack available on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Hydraulix989 9y ago
Because the standalone client uses Electron and eats up battery life, CPU, and memory like cheap sushi.

jimjimjim 9y ago

Yagni is making the world worse.

atarian 9y ago

My takeaway from this is that you can build a billion dollar company by only supporting a single browser.

chrisweekly 9y ago

Given Slack's desktop app is Electron-based, and the electron renderer is ~chrome [note the tilde!], they may be effectively developing for [web + MacOS + Windows + Linux] without bothering with any other browsers.

kuon 9y ago

I could push for another discussion medium at my company, but the thing is that I'm connected to a lot of FOSS slacks (elixir, elm, postgresql...). I don't want to give more GB of rams to another client that I'll have to run in //. I still have my irssi in a tmux terminal when I need it, but it's not a UI I can push over to my teammate (not mentioning the lack of voice call). Slack somehow did a great job at solving "something", I'm not sure if it was the lack of communication or something else. Sadly, it's taking more and more RAM and stance like not supporting non Chrome makes me even less comfortable using it.

progval 9y ago
> I still have my irssi in a tmux terminal when I need it, but it's not a UI I can push over to my teammate What about IRCCloud?
- benwilber0 9y ago
  Love and use IRCCloud everyday. Well worth the $5 or whatever to have a truly great IRC client in browser (and it's by far the best on Android). People still ask me why I pay for IRC because it just sounds crazy given the glut of high-quality free software IRC clients but my answer is always just that it's the best and since I spend a lot of my time in IRC I prefer to just pay for the best software/experience.
- kuon 9y ago
  Users are very attached to avatars, which IRCCloud was lacking last time I checked. Also I don't know if modern IRC supports audio/video calls. Thinking about it, screensharing is becoming more and more important too. We still use teamviewer, I didn't want to move to slack built in screen sharing in fear of vendor lock-in (we had teamviewer for so long, if we move out, I'd like something a bit more open).

michaelmrose 9y ago

So how much money did google float them for exclusive features. For me it recalls when skype limited the number of participants in calls if you used an AMD processor or limited the resolution unless you purchased specific webcams from partners.

mcintyre1994 9y ago
I doubt it. They're built on Electron, they get Chrome support free and probably just don't want to spend any resources on making it work in other browsers because most of their users use the native apps.

bdz 9y ago

We started using Discord and we really like it. It is targeted towards gaming communities (basically to replace TS3, Ventrilo, Mumble etc) but I think it's comparable to Slack too

thriftwy 9y ago

But so is Hangouts which is a much larger issue IMO, as it doesn't have a desktop client (does it?)

dang 9y ago

The submitted title, "Slack can't afford to support browsers other than Chrome", broke the HN guidelines by editorializing. The text says nothing about not being able to afford. It may sound the same if you don't look closely, but please do look closely, because even tiny distortions in titles can have large effects on HN discussion. If you need to paraphrase a title to make it fit, or change it because the original was misleading or linkbait (as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html asks), do it by finding the most representative language in the text itself.

dustinmoris 9y ago
Thanks for pointing this out to me!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mful 9y ago

I'm getting a little sick of the level of entitlement in tech conversations — every firm must adhere perfectly to some set ideals or else the most vocal members in the community turn the conversation into an end-of-the-internet melodrama. We laud companies that start by doing something small well, yet the second they don't support our platform of choice, it's time to banish them to the hills. (In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?) We preach focus, then act appalled when customization feature X stagnates on the backlog. We castigate businesses that spend investor dollars frivolously, and are then furious when well-funded companies act frugally and choose to make tradeoffs (like, say, only supporting one browser for a feature that doesn't work the same on all browsers, until they can achieve a certain quality threshold.) I look forward to the day when we collectively accept that companies are groups of humans generally working in earnest to do their best, not some faceless behemoth that responds only to screaming "you're awful, do my feature or I'm leaving and tweeting about it" like some petulant child. Maybe there are cases where that is a reasonable response, but when the volume is always turned up to 11 it's hard to tell the real crises from distractions.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago
I'm getting a little sick of the level of entitlement in tech conversations I'd argue it's gotten worse over the last few years, to the point that even questioning the attitude or bringing it up in conversation is frowned upon and heavily argued against.
gumby 9y ago
I disagree. If we let little monocultures exist they grow into big monocultures (Windows "monopoly", Facebook "monopoly" etc). I put "monopoly" in scare quotes because they had the de facto high ground rather than being monopolies in the Standard Oil sense.
- qbaqbaqba 9y ago
  What about Slack "monopoly"?

solomatov 9y ago

I remember similar conversation from long ago times, but instead of chrome we had IE6.

zkomp 9y ago

Sigh. Slackers gonna be slacking. Why are we regressing back to the horrible world of vendor lock in and single browser sites. Chrome is the new IE6?

olliej 9y ago

This is literally the exact argument people made when only supporting IE6 (and remember at that point in history IE was arguably the best browser, warts and all)

scarface74 9y ago

If Slack is "focusing their efforts" on their battery draining, slow, badly written excuse for a desktop app. I can't tell.