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Compared to existing and free software chat solutions[1], Slack however looks like such a kindergarten tool. It has a terrible performance. Every time one switches a channel, it basically burns a CPU. The loading of messages when scrolling down a channel with many message is not working well, not pre-loading enough messages to make scrolling a smooth experience. Instead one has to wait half a second or so until the next 20 messages or so are loaded, then scroll, then wait again, then scroll ...
And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack. Maybe on Bitbucket or Confluence it is worse. It is as if they have decided to not use any existing and perfectly well working markdown parsers, but instead get an incapable team of engineers to reimplement a bug-ridden one with missing features. One cannot even insert an image at any play in the method, but only at the bottom. That means one needs to refer to the image in the message, when otherwise one could have simply had the picture in that place where it is relevant. It is such a headache for anyone more familiar with markdown. At this point just give me a plain text input, that has any normal off the mill markdown parser to properly translate my text into a message.
Oh and they still have not managed to implement voice chat according to standards properly, so that it works in all modern browsers. While other more feature full chat programs like Discord had this solved for years ago, Slack is still the same old shit. Now I have to start ungoogled-chromium every time I want to enter a "Huddle" and navigate to their website, where they will bug me with their incessant popup asking me to use their desktop app, which I have to decline every. single. time. because chromium does not remember to block such popups from websites.
So basically Slack is quite crap.
[1]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip