Slack's desktop client is really just a wrapper around a web browser.

fintechie · on April 29, 2015

Electron, specifically...

captn3m0 · on April 29, 2015

Interesting. I haven't used it because they don't support Linux yet. (EDIT: I mean Slack, not electron)

fintechie · on April 29, 2015

You can build a wrapper (using a webview) of slack web with nw.js or electron... You'll get pretty much the same functionalities, including desktop notifications for the chats.

lewisl9029 · on April 29, 2015

It's still a desktop application.

Just built with web technologies vs natively compiled binaries, which is an implementation detail that shouldn't matter to the end user, in my opinion.

s_dev · on April 29, 2015

Spotify and Skype come to mind as well.

jimbobob · on May 1, 2015

Spotify uses Chromium Embedded Framework to serve a lot of UI elements via HTML/CSS/JavaScript[0]. Anecdotally, there seem to be a number of desktop apps moving in this direction.

[0] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-technology-behind-the-Spoti...

ponyous · on April 30, 2015

Is Skype considered start up?