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Tom Warren

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Slack’s new desktop app loads 33 percent faster and uses less RAM

Good news fellow Slack users, your productivity just got bumped by the perf gods of Slack thanks to their continued efforts and focus on the desktop app’s performance.

Slack is unveiling a new version of its desktop app for Windows and macOS today that promises big performance improvements. Slack has rebuilt its desktop app to focus on speed, and the company claims Slack will now launch 33 percent faster than before. The Slack app will even use 50 percent less RAM than before, according to the company.

Slack has been working on this overhaul for two years, slowly modernizing parts of its code along the way. While the desktop apps still run on Electron, all of the UI parts have been rebuilt using React to fix some of the shortcomings of the existing Slack app.

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A first look at Microsoft’s new Chromium-powered Edge browser

If you’ve been wondering how Microsoft’s mix of Chrome and Edge would look, then check this out. Tom Warren writing for The Verge:

Most of the user interface of the browser is a mix of Chrome and Edge, and Microsoft has clearly tried to add its own little touches here and there. There’s a read aloud accessibility option, and it simply reads the page out loud like it does in existing versions of Edge. Some features that you’d expect from Edge are missing, though. Microsoft hasn’t implemented its set aside tabs feature just yet, and write on the web with a stylus isn’t available. A dark mode is only available via a testing flag right now.

A first look at Microsoft’s new Chromium-powered Edge browser
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