Ten Years of Franz

(meetfranz.com)

27 points | by tosh 3 days ago

6 comments

  • anonzzzies 1 hour ago
    I thought it was the Lisp Franz and wondered what I missed as that's much, much older.

    Anyway; I gave this a try (on Mac) and was not impressed; coming in at 1.44GB, immediately very slow and my battery almost immediately flagging it as the app using the most energy, I went through the setup; after the setup was done I was left with a blue empty screen and nothing to click on. So I killed it and started again; that opened my workspace without any messengers added (I added 3 during setup). So I added whatsapp and that resulted in a half screen whatsapp on top of that darkblue again with no options other then to kill the app. After restart, whatsapp was there and working, albeit very slow (franz still consuming most energy); whatsapp is notably slower inside Franz than the separate one (they are both electron I think?).

    Not Franz their fault, but I added Slack and literally spent 15 minutes solving Recaptcha's of buses over 50 of them, before it let me in... Wtf. I think Slack sucks at the best of times but this was very terrible.

    Anyway; Not for me, but nice work sticking it out 10 years!

    • cantalopes 54 minutes ago
      It's electron, everything electron will always have these performance issues unfortunately

      Btw actual solution for you might be plain old Pidgin

    • fithisux 1 hour ago
      Exactly. I was tricked too.
  • shawn_w 2 hours ago
    Apparently not about the makers of Allegro Common Lisp¹ and assorted graph database tools.

    1: https://franz.com/

  • yellow_lead 42 minutes ago
    Never heard of this product, but seems like Beeper, but more expensive if you want to use more than 3 messaging services.

    Beeper is completely free, but the downside is it was acquired by Automattic (the WordPress company with the CEO who crashed out over WP Engine)

  • block_dagger 2 hours ago
    Any Franz users here? How does the unification of multiple apps help with managing comms? Is it truly better than using the different native apps?
    • TylerE 52 minutes ago
      I always found the polyglot messengers a bit underwhelming - those sorts of programs inevitably end up focusing on the lowest common denominator feature sets.
  • smithcoin 2 hours ago
    I used Franz and then went it went freemium I used ferdi for a while. I like using Zen browser and it’s based on Firefox
  • hypfer 1 hour ago
    I'm impressed that an electron wrapper around web.whatsapp.com and web.telegram.com could make it to 10 years.

    Thanks ZIRP I guess.

    • fragmede 1 hour ago
      That's incredibly dismissive of a product that some people find valuable enough to pay money for it. I'm not sure what ZIRP has to do with that, the post states he didn't take VC funding. Is UX not important to you?
      • hypfer 1 hour ago
        Yes, precisely. That was the point.

        Judging the product by its merits/substance and not by its storytelling/hype/hustle.

        UX is important to me! That's why I do not use the inferior web client of telegram wrapped in electron but the real qt one.

        Or, alternatively, I just pin the tab in my browser. The UX is so good there, you can even do some surfing beside the chatting.

        Almost feels like the good old times of presto-based opera.

        • fragmede 18 minutes ago
          If UX is important to you, how are you missing the point of the app? It seems you are going with the anti-hype against Electron apps and not engaging with the merits/substance of the app.
      • croes 1 hour ago
        Paying customers isn’t a good measure.

        Some people paid for this

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich