On macOS, the alternative would be to use Fluid[1]. You can build mini-apps from a lot of websites and the footprint is very little. (No affiliation, just a happy user)
Unless I'm missing something, isn't that just wrapping the webpage in an embedded WebView? If so its basically doing the same thing as electron, except using Safari instead of Chrome and not giving the app any native API access.
This helps in 2 ways:
- Safari is less of a resource hog than chrome
- It avoids the huge 380 meg download of electron
But it doesn't solve the runtime problems. The app is still running inside a VM (safari), so its still going to be way slower than its native equivalent and it'll use way more memory. Also in a real browser background tabs get throttled in dozens of ways. But I bet none of that throttling happens via Fluid, because even background windows can be visible at any time on macos.
I'd be curious to see a quick comparison of CPU and RAM usage of slack-for-desktop and slack-in-fluid if anyone is willing to give it a whirl. I'd do it myself except I deleted slack after writing that blog post.
[1] http://fluidapp.com/