Slack is rolling out a brand-new desktop app for its service today. The company is announcing the new rebuilt app, which looks exactly the same as before, but has lots of changes under the hood to make it faster than ever before.

Slack has gotten a lot of — wait for it — flack (sorry) for the performance and resource usage of its app, so it’s finally addressing those with the latest update. The new app, according to the company, loads 33% faster than before, and it’s so fast that Slack’s gotten rid of the loading messages.

Joining incoming calls on the app is also now 10x faster than before, but do keep in mind that these performance gains will defer depending on your actual network.

But more importantly, the new app uses 50% less memory than before. That’s obviously a massive gain in performance, considering the fact that Slack has been criticised in the past for using lots of memory, especially when a user has a lot of workspaces. An engineering deep-dive into the new app explains how Slack has managed to use less memory and introduce the performance gains, but the notable points include a focus on multi-workspace aware code, and a move to React.

Slack’s new app also introduces limited offline support, which lets you set your status, star items, and react to messages when you don’t have an internet connection.

The new app will be rolled out over the next two weeks, you can get it here. 

Tagged with Slack