We considered trade-offs no responsible engineer should face: should users sometimes see a blank page or always have idle CPU usage? In hindsight, we spent more time than we should have trying to work around the problem on our end. ( Photo in background by barackobamadotcom licensed under Creative Commons) Should be fine, right…? Narrator: It wasn’t. There’s a view for each workspace and switching between them is a visibility toggle. Unfortunately for Slack, the webview was the linchpin of the app. Besides renderer crashes during drag & drop and a litany of focus issues, the worst problem we faced was that sometimes, after a webview was hidden, it would not render content the next time it was shown. And since it’s used only by Chrome extensions - not the tabs themselves - issues filed against it can languish.
Since it’s implemented in Chromium and imported wholesale into Electron, we can’t tinker with it as easily as other APIs.
Although we (and others in the Electron community) have found it to be a spawn point for bugs, until recently it was the only secure way to embed content. You can think of the webview as a specialized iframe with concessions made for security: it runs out-of-process and lets you avoid polluting the guest page with Node. We host pages using an Electron feature called webview. With that distinction made, let’s talk about why we needed an overhaul. Installers for all platforms - mainly Windows.Support for deep-linking, launch on login, taskbar and dock badging.Support for spell-check and language detection.Support for notifications across all platforms - even Windows 7.Support for multiple workspaces is the main customer-facing feature, but much of our codebase is devoted to creating a layer of native integration that most folks don’t notice until it’s gone: You might think there’s not much to embedding a web page, but like the 1990 classic Tremors, there’s a lot happening underground. Although the webapp is on its own quest for modernity, this post is about the Electron container around it. The guest pages are like browser tabs pointed at, which we call the webapp. The desktop app is a host for some number of guest pages.
You’ll sometimes see us refer to “the webapp” vs “the desktop app ” what does this mean? How do they relate to one another? A picture might clear this up: It’s like a browser that only takes you to Before we dig into the specifics of 3.0 - why it was necessary and how we got there - we need to cover a little bit of Slack history. The good news is that it’s available on our beta channel now. In all seriousness, the experience some customers have had leaves us with a pit in our stomach, and we’ve been working tirelessly towards a more mature version of the app, dubbed Slack 3.0. Kinda seems like that something is “writing a desktop chat app in JavaScript”. The only silver lining has been being on the receiving end of some absolutely savage burns: Instead of flailing limbs and pitch squeaks, ours has manifested in ways rather more grim: inexplicably failing to render content, reloading during common operations, and error screens that aren’t actionable. Recently Slack on the desktop has been going through an awkward adolescence.
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