New client less of a resource hog, Slack claims, following ground-up rewrite

Slack has updated its desktop and web clients to lessen the app's resource intensiveness - specifically, slashing its memory use in half and reducing by 33 per cent the amount of time it takes to launch.

The update is intended to address long-held criticisms of the popular collaboration app in what the company claimed has been a complete rebuild from the ground-up.

The update will be rolled out to users over the next few weeks.

As a result of the update, users can also join incoming calls with team members up to 10-times faster, it added.

Other improvements include limited offline support so that users with a poor internet connection can view channels and conversations they've previously opened. And, because performance under the new client promises to be so fast, loading messages have been removed - "Slack loads too quickly for them to be readable," according to the Slack changelog.

"We've added back and forward buttons next to the Jump to a section in the sidebar allowing you to navigate through your channel history with ease," the change log continued. And, "our new interface makes it easy to see who's joined meetings and when they started".

Slack claimed that some of its largest users, such as Oracle and IBM, are supporting more than 90,000 users on the app collaborating at any one time - hence the need for a rebuild.

"As more conversations, information and apps run through Slack, the underlying technology that supports it must scale too. That's why we rebuilt Slack's desktop experience to run faster and more reliably across a growing number of workspaces and channels," the company claimed in a blog posting.

News of the new client comes a week after the company admitted that a 2015 security breach was more serious than previously thought, with the company forcing a password reset on accounts it believes might be affected.

It also comes after the company floated on the New York Stock Exchange in a rare ‘direct listing', selling shares directly to buyers rather than employing an investment bank, which would take a large cut of the proceeds.

However, Slack is also facing more competition, with Microsoft claiming that its competing Teams app now has more users, while also banning its own staff from using Slack.

source computing

Industry: Unified Communications