> Does using Slack as a Safari Web App reduce resource consumption vs the Electron app?
Yes. Yes it does.
This is why “native” apps that use the operating system’s default WebView for the corresponding platform run seamlessly compared to apps packaged with Electron.
Safari is has much better performance than any other web browser on macOS, and this change will allow users to access those benefits.
> Safari is has much better performance than any other web browser on macOS
Typical marketing BS. Browsers are probably very close to performance. Chrome said last year they are actually the fastest browser on M1/2. On Speedometer 2.0 (apple developed benchmark) with M2 Air Chrome currently has the highest score of 491.
What does fastest mean? Does it have the most responsive UI? Is it the fastest to open? Is it using less memory than the competition to achieve its speed?
To me, proof is in the pudding: Chrome feels large and bloated when I use it. Safari feels snappy.
I know it is an early developer beta, and I haven't even begun to debug it, but Slack running in this method does not perform well. My sent messages frequently show and then get stuck in the grey "sending" text indefinitely after they appear as sent on other devices, and I often don't receive messages in the web app until I force a refresh.
This is my experience with Slack as a PWA in Chrome, or even in a regular tab in Safari. My guess is that Slack doesn't play nice with attempts to snooze background tabs to save system resources.
Also using Safari is great if your app is Mac-only, but the whole point of Electron is to support Mac and Windows and Linux. And not have to worry about browser quirks and Safari versions and backfills and whatnot.
Because it duplicates the overhead of an entire browser (and Chromium at that) rather than the overhead of a single webpage in an already-open browser?
So overhead for a single app might be comparable, but each subsequent Electron app that I replace with a Safari Web App would use significantly less CPU/RAM
I believe so. I would hope that the overhead for "having more than 0 webviews open" is global across the entire OS; we know that macOS uses a global shared library cache at least.
I think it's safe to assume any Safari PWA will be more resource-efficient than a Chromium counterpart.
In most cases, the decision will finally always revolve around the system hooks – how many does the Electron app have, and whether are you able to live without them.
