
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.
