alt Hacker News> Matrix isn’t perfect but it has only improved in the 5 years I’ve been using it.
I'd very much like to disagree.
From the top of my head, in the past few years of using Element Web:
- Notification center is now gone.
- Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms.
- At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM.
- UI feels more sluggish by the day.
- Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.
- Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place.
And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web.
I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.
Replies
Have you considered that multiple of your complaints could be addressed by protocol improvements?
> Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.
What?! How is this possible? How come users tolerate it at all?
> - Notification center is now gone.
It's still there; it just got moved into Labs given it never worked in encrypted rooms, and having a flakey feature for new users was (correctly) considered worse than not having a feature at all. Go look for "Enable the notifications panel in the room header (Unreliable in encrypted rooms)" in Labs on develop.element.io or Element Nightly.
> - Room search is now only limited to official Matrix rooms.
This isn't accurate. On one server (matrix.org) the room directory is currently locked down to stop it filling up with spam, however this should be opened up again to be a curated room list in the near future.
> - At peak it consumes ~2.2 GB of RAM.
> - UI feels more sluggish by the day.
> - Loading it now takes ~10 minutes.
So agreed that Element Web performance is very painful for power-users. This is because we've been putting all of our effort into fixing perf in the protocol itself (via sliding sync etc) using matrix-rust-sdk on mobile in Element X to prove it all out. We've also spent huge amounts of time on encryption reliability.
However, good news is that we've finally moved to Element X Web (codenamed as Aurora: https://github.com/element-hq/aurora), which runs matrix-rust-sdk in browser but with MVVM React components from Element Web for the UI. You can play with an alpha at https://dangerousdemos.net (non-permenant-URL) right now. In contrast:
- At peak it consumes 80MB of heap.
- UI feels instant and is O(1) regardless of account size
- Loading takes ~2 seconds (although that's about 20x slower than it should be given Aurora doesn't currently persist any local state, so it's loading everything from scratch on launch).
> - Using it as an IRC bouncer (to Libera) is now gone, which was what initially attracted me in the first place.
Agreed that this sucks. We did everything we could to stop Libera removing the bridge, but failed due to lack of $ meaning we didn't have enough dedicated manpower to meet Libera's demands.
> And I don't even use the voice / call functionality of Element Web.
Element Call's actually rather good, in terms of providing end-to-end encrypted group calling. If you used it you'd probably complain that we broke backwards compatibility with the legacy 1:1 Matrix voip calling though, which would be true; again, due to lack of dedicated manpower.
> I somewhat understand the reasoning behind the decisions, but I feel like they should have improved the UX first before working on the protocol itself.
To improve the UX with clients, we had to improve the protocol, and Element X shows how good that UX improvement is. We're now catching up on Web.