The moment it became obvious
It happened during a video call. Someone on the call was sharing their screen, and you could see the mouse stutter. The call itself was fine — the problem was Slack running in the background, consuming around 4% CPU and over 1 GB of RAM on a machine with 16 GB total.
That's not a resource-constrained machine. That's a modern computer being measurably degraded by a chat application. And the person on the other end of the call had just accepted it as normal.
We weren't the only ones
The frustration isn't niche. Search "Slack RAM" or "Slack slow" and you'll find years of forum posts, Reddit threads, and comment sections — all saying the same thing. Slack's response has consistently been "we're working on performance." The app has improved at the margins, but the architecture hasn't changed: it's still a full web browser bundled inside a chat client.
That architecture means a minimum overhead of 150–200 MB just for the framework, before any application logic runs. Every workspace multiplies it. It compounds over a workday.
Why not just wrap the web app?
The obvious shortcut is: take Slack's web interface, wrap it in a desktop window, and call it a lighter client. Several tools do exactly this.
We didn't want to build that. It solves the window-management problem — one fewer browser tab to switch to — but does nothing for memory or CPU. You're still running Chromium. The fan still spins. The battery still drains.
If the fix doesn't address the root cause, it's not really a fix.
The decision to build natively
We chose Qt6 — the same UI framework that powers Telegram Desktop. Qt compiles to genuine native code: no bundled browser, no JavaScript runtime, no virtual machine between your keystrokes and the screen. The result is an application that the operating system treats like any other native app.
The tradeoff is real. Native development is slower to iterate on than web technologies. Features take longer to build. We can't just drop in a JavaScript library when we need a new component. But the outcome is an app that starts in under a second and sits at ~0% CPU when idle. That's the thing we set out to fix, and it's fixed.
What we gave up — and why that's OK
msga doesn't have Slack's complete feature set today. Voice and video calls, Huddles, Canvas, and app integrations are on the roadmap. If any of those are critical to your daily work, the official app is still the right tool for now.
But a very large number of people use Slack primarily for text: sending messages, reading channels, replying in threads, searching for something someone said last week. For that use case, msga does the job — without the overhead that makes your computer drag.
What's next
macOS and Windows support are in development. The goal is the same experience across all three platforms: sub-second startup, quiet at idle, small memory footprint.
msga is free, open source under GPL-3.0, and built publicly on GitHub. If you're tired of Slack slowing your workday down, try it.