[HN Gopher] Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping...
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Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for
Edge Webview2
Author : riffraff
Score : 298 points
Date : 2021-06-26 11:32 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tomtalks.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (tomtalks.blog)
| makecheck wrote:
| Somewhere along the line, we _really_ lost it in software.
|
| A few decades ago I paid about $1000 for a one _MEGABYTE_ memory
| upgrade, and even that was needed only because a single graphics
| application at that time could clearly benefit from the extra RAM
| to do more things.
|
| Now? I have 32 _GIGABYTES_ of RAM, and we are celebrating that a
| _chat client_ has now managed to find a way to use a slightly
| less absurd amount of memory, and has graciously returned some of
| our massive computing resources to us? This app barely does
| anything!! The apps that require all that power should at least
| be more useful...right?
|
| As far as I can tell, every person on the planet is using more
| battery power and upgrading their machines more often just to
| make up for the laziness of software companies. In exchange for
| the ability of software teams to "easily" write one obnoxious
| cross-platform beast, we all get to burn through our CPUs and
| memory. These companies have more than enough money to invest in
| writing software for different platforms using the heavily-
| optimized system frameworks on those platforms.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Not really relevant but I need to vent.
|
| Client dropped Slack for Teams. I hate it, and information
| exchange has dropped precipitously since everyone switched. So
| slow, half the time text markup doesn't work, and the UI is
| inconsistent depending on if you're typing in a chat, meeting, or
| channel.
|
| Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of
| information. (But that's not the fault of the Teams software)
|
| I loathe Teams.
| ezst wrote:
| > Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of
| information.
|
| Welcome to another walled garden messaging service! At least
| lessons were learned..not.
| goda90 wrote:
| My team started off piloting a self hosted Mattermost instance
| used by our developers and quality assurance testers. Tons of
| information exchange as well a team bonding.
|
| Then they rolled out Teams for the whole company. We lost a ton
| of features that made Mattermost a delight to use. The way
| channels worked felt less intuitive, and it was just harder to
| care about group messages. And the worst part? A 30 day
| deletion policy.
| yread wrote:
| Even without the deletion policy, searching only brings up
| matching messages without the context and scrolling back
| takes ages (and jumps to the present from time to time).
| walterlb wrote:
| That's my number one gripe. Searching message history is
| absolutely terrible.
| spoonjim wrote:
| On the contrary, I find that the total suckage of Teams means
| that there is no random chatter in Teams like we had in Slack
| because people hate using it. No memes or other random stuff. I
| like it.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Or just have dedicated rooms for memes/rules about no memes
| in serious channels and mute the rest...
| jackson1442 wrote:
| We use Teams at my University. Generally if something
| University-sponsored outside of the college of engineering
| wants to make a chat about something, they use Teams. CoE uses
| Discord, fortunately.
|
| Easily my least favorite chat app, save for those that break
| basic functionality as their core product (Snapchat). Teams
| doesn't seem to understand that organization admins might want
| to see user names in a different format than users. Everyone's
| name is Last, F., which makes sense from an administrative
| standpoint but needing to click into someone's profile to
| figure out who they are gets old _very_ fast.
|
| The only selling point that Teams seems to have is "we're
| already paying for it."
| ratww wrote:
| Same for us. Our channels went from vibrant to dead in a week
| because notifications are somehow broken there in ways I can't
| explain.
|
| The solution for us was to create multi-user chats in the
| "Chat" section and let the "Teams" section die the horrible
| death it deserves.
|
| The notifications are more consistent in "Chat". But god forbid
| someone talks too much, because then you get those horrible
| non-native notifications that are completely broken in itself
| too.
|
| It's probably the worst app I've used in years, and that's
| saying a lot because app quality is incredibly bad these days.
| criddell wrote:
| The "Teams" part has never made sense. A few exist where I
| work and I don't think they have ever been used.
| xyst wrote:
| I agree with this. Also how can they forget an option to "paste
| without formatting"? Copying stuff from other sources is
| extremely painful. At this point, I leave it as is. I don't
| have time to micromanage each copy and paste.
|
| Also teams has this arbitrary message character limit that
| makes it terrible for sharing large chunks of text (partial
| logs for example).
|
| While the integrations with outlook (mail/scheduling) + teams
| works "well enough", the experience of the app itself leaves
| something to be desired.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I always paste into the address bar of my browser to clear
| the formatting. Some other solutions here are probably
| better, though.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Paste without formatting is Ctrl-Shift-V, isn't it? I don't
| know if I've ever tried it in Teams though.
| lttlrck wrote:
| It works consistently across all MS products I use
| including Teams and Office365.
| everdrive wrote:
| >Also how can they forget an option to "paste without
| formatting"
|
| That's just Microsoft.
|
| I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've
| wanted to actually retain source formatting. But, it's the
| default option on almost any microsoft product out there.
| And, apparently, on Teams it's not an option at all.
| unknown_error wrote:
| I bet Teams secretly used Word xml style tags behind the
| scenes.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| No, it's HTML. (Source: entirely too much familiarity
| with that heap of garbage.)
| Keyframe wrote:
| Ctrl+shift V... How about where's reply to a specific message
| on a desktop/web app? Isn't that like the basest of the
| basics? Audio and video quality is great however, millions of
| times ahead of Slack and a bit better than Zoom, but ever so
| slightly, from my experience.
| bloopernova wrote:
| I have to use the Mac plain paste shortcut all the time:
| shift+option+command+v (Ctrl+shift+v in windows, not sure
| about Linux)
|
| Definitely a helpful shortcut!
| leejoramo wrote:
| For the cases were software or OS doesn't support native
| plain text paste I create a similar shortcut in Keyboard
| Maestro (macOS) or AutoHotKey (Windows).
|
| As an extra measure I configure the macro to automatically
| type the text and not use the direct clipboard paste. This
| takes care of the situations were the app prohibited
| pasting.
| unknown_error wrote:
| Wow, that requires a lot of fingers. It's like an OS and
| fighting game all in one.
| wombatpm wrote:
| SiliconGraphics machines had the Vulcan death grip that
| took two hands to force a reboot.
| xyst wrote:
| Didn't know OS's had their own native plain paste shortcut.
| I'll start using this, thanks!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I wish "paste without formatting" was the default, and you
| had to use the contortionist keyboard shortcut to _include_
| formatting.
| pivo wrote:
| You can change it, modify the key mapping like so:
|
| https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-
| format...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Neat, thanks!
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Mac Shortcuts are a nightmare, jeez.
| analog31 wrote:
| From what I've seen, a lot of people just paste screen
| captures.
| qlm wrote:
| Can somebody explain why "paste with formatting" is so widely
| the default option? I have literally never wanted to paste
| with formatting and neither have multiple family members who
| have needed help with preventing it from happening.
| mason55 wrote:
| The normal case is when you're cut/copy/pasting intra-app.
| Imagine if you formatted some text and then cut/paste to
| move it around and by default you lost your formatting.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yep, this would be a good reason to keep it. You could
| probably get around this by using a separate MIME type
| for your app's content. If that type is present, use it,
| otherwise default to no formatting.
|
| I'm not sure how intuitive that would be for users,
| though, having different defaults depending on where the
| data is coming from.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I do actually use it all the time. We share some slack
| channels with external partners but email is the main mode
| for some others and I have to send code, interfaces, etc on
| occasion and copy pasting from VS Code maintains the
| formatting in Apple mail which I've found useful. No
| hitting the space at a hundred times to indent a nested
| line. And it's easy enough to escape.
|
| But that behaviour everywhere would drive me nuts.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I think they mean formatting as in slightly different
| font, color, background or goddamn underline and the
| like. I have never found it useful, and would be much
| much better with a non-default right click past as
| formatted option.
|
| Your use case will not suffer since whitespace is text.
| andybak wrote:
| Formatting can hugely change the way text is read. It's
| quite common for the spacing between sections to be
| derived from the formatting. So removing the formatting
| can result in section headings with zero space from the
| preceeding paragraph but a manual newline between it and
| the next paragraph. Thus the headings essentially
| disappear into the preceeding text.
|
| I've had countless other examples over the years where
| "paste without formatting" involved lots of manual
| editing of white space. Bullet and numbered lists
| sometimes vanish which rather matters if the text says
| "see point 3 above"
| 41b696ef1113 wrote:
| I imagine it stems from Powerpoint or Word. If I move
| bolded header text from the bottom of the page to the top
| of the page, it would be irritating to re-apply formatting.
| Once you have established this precedent, easy for it to
| infect the rest of the ecosystem.
| Someone wrote:
| History. The Mac didn't have "paste without formatting",
| and assigned [?]-V to "paste with formatting".
|
| Even if it had, they might have made it the default, either
| to show of that styles copied over, or for consistency. If
| you paste a picture, you don't lose formatting, either (of
| the picture, whatever that means, or any text in the image)
|
| If you copied some text in MacWrite, for example, exited
| MacWrote, launched MacPaint, and [?]V-ed into MacPaint, you
| likely wanted to keep the font, size and style.
|
| Some programs also have several variants of "without
| formatting". Excel is a good example
| (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/paste-
| options-8ea...). Which one should be the default?
| stephenr wrote:
| And yet macOS now has paste without formatting in almost
| every app I can think of (it's enough that I'd guess it's
| a standard thing apps get if they use native frameworks)
| AND it's trivial to remap a menu item to another keyboard
| shortcut across the entire OS.
| ljm wrote:
| Last time I built something on MacOS, this was basically
| just a feature of the clipboard API that each app could
| use independently. When copying to the clipboard, you
| could declare numerous formats for what was copied, and
| any app receiving clipboard input could state that they
| only accepted one format.
|
| e.g. copy a jpeg file and you can paste it into Slack,
| and it will automatically add the image to the post.
| Paste it into the terminal and you'll get the absolute
| path to the file. Those sound like sensible defaults that
| are essentially 'context sensitive paste'.
|
| You could copy a link from a webpage and store both the
| HTML version and a raw-text version in the clipboard,
| probably a version that used an annotated string, too.
|
| For the same reason, yeah... this isn't as intuitive when
| it comes to software like Excel.
| Someone wrote:
| That has been around on the Mac since 1984 and
| applications were always encouraged to put plain text on
| the clipboard alongside formatted text, but we're talking
| UI here, not technology. This kind of UI allows you to
| choose which of these you want because it turns out the
| application cannot always make the best choice.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Some programs also have several variants of "without
| formatting". Excel is a good example
| (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/paste-
| options-8ea...). Which one should be the default?
|
| Most of those are very specific versions of formatting or
| specialty features.
|
| The only ones that would qualify as "paste without
| formatting" are "formulas" and "values" modes, and of
| those two I'd probably say "formulas" is a better
| default.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| IMO if paste with formatting was assigned another shortcut
| like Ctrl+Shift+V and the default Ctrl+V was without
| formatting, that would be less frustrating.
| kixiQu wrote:
| If you sit someone who doesn't know How Links Work in front
| of some text with an inline hyperlink in it, then try to
| get them to copy it over to another place, you end up
| wanting to get to this default pretty quickly. "Right click
| copy link address" is real unintuitive. I've never wanted
| the text formatting itself to come over, bold text and
| headings and whatnot, but since that lives in about the
| same conceptual space, it's a casualty of design.
| lolinder wrote:
| It would be pretty trivial to paste without formatting
| but still auto-parse links. Many apps do the link parsing
| on the client side, so it's not a formatting concern at
| all.
| corin_ wrote:
| That's fine if the text you're copying spells out the
| URL, but often it will be just a word(s) that are
| hyperlinked, so if pasted as plain text the software you
| paste into has no idea there was a URL linked at all.
|
| (But I too wish plain text pasting was the default more
| often.)
| mindri0t wrote:
| How would that work in the case where the link display
| text is not the address? Normally pasting without
| formatting discards the fact that some text like
| "download other file" is a link.
| handrous wrote:
| All I can figure is that research/observation showed that:
|
| - Normal users often prefer to paste with formatting.
|
| - Normal users will _never_ figure out how to do that if it
| 's not the default.
|
| - Normal users will usually reluctantly accept paste-with-
| formatting even if it's not what they wanted--that is, it's
| only rarely _entirely_ unacceptable for them.
|
| - Power users will figure out how to paste without
| formatting.
| unknown_error wrote:
| You think Microsoft, of Ribbon and Clippy and full-screen
| start menu ads, and 20 different control panels for the
| same settings, does UX testing...? The same Microsoft
| that can't decide whether normal users prefer Windows,
| Windows Phone, Zune, or Xbox interfaces, so they just go
| ahead and add a little of each to all of them?
|
| More likely they were just worried Slack was attacking
| their enterprise segment and killing Skype so they rushed
| a shitty product to market ASAP. "Embrace, extend,
| extinguish" has turned into "panic, copycat, repeat".
| tyingq wrote:
| I know there's Ctrl-Shift-V, but I use "PureText" on Windows
| so I can map my own hotkey.
|
| https://stevemiller.net/puretext/
| kyriakos wrote:
| Hack for the character limit is to share as code.
| Unfortunately that adds 3 clicks to the process.
| icey wrote:
| Paste with formatting annoyed me so much I made a website
| that's just a giant textbox I can use to paste stuff into
| (https://qi.io)
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Now that's going above and beyond.
| sgtnasty wrote:
| Nothing is more painful than to watch others copy and paste
| complex linux commands from Teams into the terminal, and
| watch the shell get corrupted. Windows copy and paste has
| always been a mess for me. macOS seems to do it much better,
| but X11 middle click is the best.
| carom wrote:
| My trick for paste without formatting is to throw it in the
| url bar and copy it back out.
| pwg wrote:
| Better to use notepad. The formatting goes away, and you
| can copy the text back out.
| dajohnson89 wrote:
| if you accidentally press enter, are you ok with the
| browser sending that information wherever it does?
| jyrkesh wrote:
| FYI, Ctrl+Shift+V works as a paste without formatting
| shortcut in Teams. But for some reason I can't work out, they
| chose not to put it in the right-click UI.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I worked at a game company that was moving from google
| enterprise (gmail, docs, etc) to office be use our owner
| organization used office. Everyone fought hard to keep slack
| because teams is so bad. We got to keep slack but had to adopt
| office and it was a disaster. Outlook web and app act
| completely different, the mail web and app act completely
| different. the way to edit and share files was very confusing
| and always had permission issues. We were told we'd keep our
| email history, then the last 2 years of our history, and then
| finally they were unable to migrate the history and we lost
| years of emails. It messed the company up so much, I'm sure
| it's one of the contributing factors for why the company was
| closed 6 months later. Like we were at the end of a 2 year
| development process going into soft launch, but this migration
| crippled production and the parent company never took
| responsibility.
| rvanlaar wrote:
| My 2cts with teams. Multiple clients use teams and sent me
| invites with team links.
|
| There seems to be no way to open or see the meetings directly
| within team. I always have to open my mail, click the link, go
| to the website, click on open in teams and only then will it
| open the meeting.
| apexalpha wrote:
| I still can't get over the fact that even Microsoft uses an
| electron app for their own OS.
|
| If not even Microsoft itself writes native code for their own
| bloody OS then we're just doomed. It's just all so sluggish.
| dsego wrote:
| Yeah, what ever happened to their Silverlight platform?
| Someone wrote:
| It's alive, but only on IE 11, and only for four more
| months.
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/silverlight-
| end-...:
|
| _"Microsoft Silverlight will reach the end of support on
| October 12, 2021. Silverlight development framework is
| currently only supported on Internet Explorer 10 and
| Internet Explorer 11, with support for Internet Explorer 10
| ending on January 31, 2020. There is no longer support for
| Chrome, Firefox, or any browser using the Mac operating
| system."_
| Closi wrote:
| > If not even Microsoft itself writes native code for their
| own bloody OS then we're just doomed
|
| I agree a native client would be great, although I assume
| this choice is more because Microsoft wanted it to be multi-
| platform across iOS, Android, Web, Mac, Linux, Windows,
| Chromebook e.t.c. and that would either require building it
| multiple times, or building it in html/js as the lowest
| common denominator (web).
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| > Oh and none of the Slack logs were kept, losing years of
| information.
|
| Agree with your sentiment except that it's not Teams fault that
| your client didn't care about message history when they decided
| to migrate to Teams.
| bloopernova wrote:
| True, good point. I updated my comment, thanks!
| uncomputation wrote:
| My last job used Teams after I had years of experience with
| Slack and I'm right there with you. I actually enjoy being on
| Slack and feel like it adds something to the workplace culture
| (although yes, as many have pointed out before on HN, not
| everything Slack/real-time team software adds is good). Custom
| emojis in particular, such a simple thing and yet they really
| build a channel's culture. Slack feels _fun_. Contrast that
| with Teams, which just feels soulless and corporate and...
| "angular" is the word that comes to mind. Obviously they are
| both run for profit, by corporations, for work, but the feel is
| indescribably different to me. Super grateful my current job
| uses Slack.
| pedrocr wrote:
| We were using Skype for Business before and Teams was a big
| improvement over that. It does video conferencing and file
| sharing well, with even collaborative editing of Office files
| working well. The chat features seem like an afterthought so if
| you're comparing it based on that I'm not surprised it's that
| bad.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _We were using Skype for Business_
|
| So you mean the Lync codebase.
|
| That's a pretty low bar to start with.
|
| As one "for example", that's the product team that couldn't
| figure out how to stop repeating AD logins with invalid saved
| passwords for 5+ years. Which invariably led to a system you
| were signed into somewhere locking your account every
| password rotation.
| pedrocr wrote:
| An extremely low bar, it was incredibly poor software. The
| Teams migration was great compared to that, even for
| messaging.
|
| For VC and file collaboration Teams seems good in absolute,
| for messaging it seems good only relative to that.
| Messaging feels like a third-priority feature in Teams. If
| you're coming from a good messaging experience and that's
| what you mostly use Teams for then it's no doubt a really
| poor experience.
| chx wrote:
| While Slack displays all your organizations in a single tabbed
| UI, presenting you with the number of unread messages on the
| tab icons in Teams you need to hard switch and you never know
| what happens in the others. This makes Teams worse than nothing
| in communications because one half of the communication expects
| you to communicate and you are not even aware of this. You
| literally must jump organizations constantly , possibly needing
| to log in too, just to see who is pinging you.
|
| This has been known since 2016 at least
| https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
| "Support for multiple work accounts is still being worked on
| and will come at a later date."
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Right! My company switched from Slack to Teams and even
| though we recreated all our original channels, public
| discussion has all but died. Having to context switch between
| private messaging and public channels, even though it's just
| another tab, is apparently just too much friction.
|
| Also opening docs and excel sheets inside the main window by
| default and blocking chat while doing it is absolutely
| atrocious.
| wussboy wrote:
| Your last paragraph is a huge source of frustration for me.
| Such a boner move.
| bluGill wrote:
| Swtiching windows in teams is slow, 20 years ago Microsoft
| knew the research on this and minimum viable response time.
| They ignore it and the predictable result is people don't
| take advantage of teams. It possibly could be good, but I
| want Skype back, it didn't do as much, but what it did it
| did well.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| You can't even read stuff from other tenants if you are in a
| video call. Teams came for free at a lot companies I worked
| with and all of them have moved back to Slack and many of
| them are also paying for it.
| chx wrote:
| My favorite about video calls is at one of my organizations
| I am access denied to recordings even when I participated
| in it. I can't attach images either.
|
| Someone built these features. Why are you building a
| feature on who can attach images?? The entire mindset is
| completely wrong and comes from an overcontrolling
| enterprise mindset completely incompatible with what we
| expect from a chat tool.
|
| Oh and every time I log in Teams asks whether it can
| control my entire device. _No_.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Good it asks though. So many stupid apps like Instagram
| and so on that assumes that the logged on user owns the
| device. In Europe it is very common that you are provided
| with a device from your work place that you also use in
| private. I did a password reset on Instagram with such a
| device. Totally unexceptable.
| [deleted]
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _chat, meeting, or channel_ (from parent)
|
| This is the root of all Teams fuckups.
|
| It's an asinine primitive mapping, that could only come from
| a project manager who spent their entire career optimizing
| SharePoint access controls to meet HR product requests.
|
| The entire point of modern chat solutions is persistence and
| searchability. So the only real differentiation should be
| public or private channels.
| slumdev wrote:
| Same.
|
| Our company (we'll call it Monsarno) was bought by a certain
| German aspirin company, and our Bavarian overlords are slowly
| forcing us from Slack over to Teams. It's a nightmare, and very
| few groups have made the transition willingly.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Bayer isn't Bavarian, it's Northrine Westphalian.
| slumdev wrote:
| I guess there'll be some more required CBTs about the
| company's history and naming, then.
| [deleted]
| musicale wrote:
| Teams is what made me learn to hate Electron and web apps
| masquerading as desktop apps.
|
| They also seem to have learned little from Slack, Discord, etc..
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Teams sucks.
|
| It's user interface is unintuitive and messy. I find it difficult
| to find the context I want.
|
| Search doesn't seem to work.
|
| It takes a long time to load.
|
| When it eventually loads, it pops itself up in front of whatever
| I've opened and started working on (whilst Teams is busy loading)
| to take all my keystrokes until I notice the keystrokes aren't
| showing up in the program I was already using - I've seen at
| least one person's password entered into a chat session because
| of Teams "grabbing the front".
|
| And, finally, Teams has taken the initiative to redefine "full
| screen" such that even that unambiguous terminology is now
| meaningless. Full screen now means "zoom in, just a little bit".
| Fuck you Teams.
|
| Screen sharing / video conferencing works fine, however. Except
| the full screen thing, so even the decent bit has a large caveat.
|
| My apologies for the outburst, but I had to get it off my chest.
| Teams fucking sucks.
| _ix wrote:
| I started writing a long-winded thing to enumerate the problems
| with Teams that no product person at Microsoft will ever see,
| so why bother? It's a terrible product. The purported sticker
| price for enterprises disguises the costly loss of productivity
| due to this mess. It's just a godawful mess.
| postalrat wrote:
| Teams sucks. Slack sucks. Discord FTW!
| rjsw wrote:
| > Teams sucks.
|
| Yep. Was in a Teams meeting last week.
|
| Audio mixing is poor compared with Zoom, any background noise
| on an active microphone will cut out another person speaking.
|
| The controls menu keeps changing. Click on the "raise hand"
| icon and it disappears, you can't "lower your hand" until it
| reappears some random time later.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Why is it that in every one of these meeting apps, speaking
| causes them to totally garble any other person speaking
| simultaneously? It's like they go "oh you are speaking lets
| downgrade all others to 1kbit/s". Stop with the byte pinching
| and just give us the full fidelity sound like I'm using
| TeamSpeak, it's fricking audio.
| edp wrote:
| I think it's because of echo cancelling technology. In
| software like discord you can disable it and it's way
| better when people are talking simultaneously.
| alach11 wrote:
| Yep. It goes away if everybody is wearing headphones,
| which I strongly recommend.
| minaguib wrote:
| What is it with "search doesn't work/work well" being a
| universal gripe with all of Microsoft's products ?
|
| It's not like there are no good examples of what modern user
| expectations are for searching a body of text....
| dehrmann wrote:
| I haven't worked on a search product, but I've worked at
| small shops with bad search products (one's business was even
| that product).
|
| Search is hard when you don't have lots of training data,
| data is poorly organized, you have mostly tail queries, and
| people aren't used to you search engine's quirks. Search
| results are also bad when you're balancing quality with yield
| (as in revenue).
|
| Google mostly doesn't have these problems. It has loads of
| people searching for head queries, so results are
| continuously being tested to death. Website owners put some
| effort into making their content accessible to Google with
| SEO, and people are used to searching with Google, so they've
| learned a few tricks for less popular queries.
|
| Local search and corporate intranet search have none of that.
| You're basically whatever Lucene does out-of-the-box.
| juangacovas wrote:
| For the sake of discovery, I'd say Manticore search does a
| pretty (and fast) good job with full text searches and
| suggestions.
| syspec wrote:
| Isn't EdgeWebview2 also built on top of chromium? I though edge
| was now a fork of chromium
| MR4D wrote:
| I wonder if VS Code will follow.
| Shorel wrote:
| And... will it work again in Ubuntu?
| jordemort wrote:
| As far as I can tell, WebView2 only runs on Windows right now;
| the current version of Teams runs on Mac and Linux as well,
| though. I wonder if that means WebView2 will also be coming to
| those platforms, or if it'll remain an Electron app on those
| platforms, or if they're just dropping support for those
| platforms entirely.
|
| This could also have interesting implications for VS Code. I
| wonder if Electron has a future at all, or if it's going to go
| the way of Atom, which was another thing MS picked up from GitHub
| and then walked away from in favor of a quackalike with a
| stronger Microsoft pedigree.
| j4yav wrote:
| The amount of memory that app uses is the least of its issues.
| emddudley wrote:
| Teams has worked great for me. It's comparably fast to Slack.
| Calls and screen sharing work perfectly. I am not sure what is
| different about my situation versus the other users here. I use
| the native app on Windows, and my org currently has channels and
| most integrations disabled (Outlook, OneDrive).
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Native apps or die. I won't use anything based on Atom or
| Electron.
|
| The reason is that these "cross-platform" applications on top of
| web browsers are basically complete operating systems emulated on
| top of the underlying OS. It's worse than turtles all the way
| down; they're sea urchins: fragile, prickly, and lethargic. And
| these memory-hogging leviathans multiply faster than rabbits so
| developers don't have to get their "hands dirty with details"
| like fast, efficient, proper software.
|
| Just because someone can write a ray-tracer in BrainFuck doesn't
| mean NVIDIA/AMD/Intel should steer the whole industry to using
| something impractical because developers get excited about all of
| the "possibilities."
| anoncake wrote:
| No one uses Teams voluntarily anyway.
| gbil wrote:
| Some hope for Mac users maybe? Current state is just shit,
| especially for corporate users who can't just drop it
| https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Some hope for Mac users maybe?_
|
| Nope, Edge WebView2 is Windows-only. Unless the memory
| improvements are not actually tied to Electron, but rather
| Teams 1.0 having a shit codebase.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/#su...
| zamadatix wrote:
| WebView2 is being ported to Mac and Linux https://github.com/
| MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645...
|
| Linux looks like it won't happen until 2022 but Mac is first.
| I'd guess they are aiming to have it release around the same
| time as a bunch of other stuff this Fall but still can't
| commit to that date yet.
|
| Regardless it'll be coming to Mac.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| To repeat what I wrote elsewhere: Microsoft is looking to port
| Webview2 to macOS and then Linux. No timeline though.
|
| So this will eventually also apply to macOS, yes.
|
| https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/131...
|
| https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645
| [deleted]
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Well if it's prebundled, I guess it will be properly audited and
| hopefully less evil than Zoom.. which has been known to install
| services on your PC that are easily exploitable.
|
| Maybe people will stop sending me zoom invites.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Was thinking maybe this would mention Tauri but looks like
| they're rolling their own? Haven't tried Tauri myself, and but
| really looking forward.
| jl6 wrote:
| On the offchance that someone from Microsoft is reading, I'll
| take this opportunity to again express my disbelief that it's
| impossible to print a chat or export it in any way from Teams.
| Even copy & paste is broken if you try to get more than a
| screenful.
|
| Here is why this functionality is important:
|
| * When a colleague leaves the organisation, you can't search for
| a chat with them any more, so the chats are effectively lost.
|
| * When people chat in a meeting, that meeting becomes the only
| place the chat exists, and do you really want to have to keep
| years worth of old meeting items in your calendar just to avoid
| losing that chat? And how are you supposed to organize calendar
| items as a store of conversations anyway?
|
| * Its the most basic level of interoperability. How can you take
| a product seriously when it traps your data like this?
| thrower123 wrote:
| It had better use less memory. Currently it runs at about a gig
| on my machine, without any meetings in progress.
|
| This is about 8-10 times heavier than the Skype for Business
| client was.
|
| WebView2 looks to be a great choice instead of Electron, now that
| they're shipping Edgeium everywhere. The old IE WebBrowser
| control has been a non-starter for a while.
| sivakon wrote:
| The fact that they market Xamarin/MAUI as cross platform and
| Blazer for web, and not use any of their tech to build a cross
| platform native/web app is laughable.
| mattferderer wrote:
| TypeScript is also there thing. They've been pushing React as
| well in SharePoint & other areas for quite a few years.
|
| Blazor is very new & was considered experimental until
| recently. It's still fairly bleeding edge.
|
| Microsoft started Teams in 2016 & bought Xamarin in 2016.
|
| JavaScript developers are also more plentiful than Xamarin I
| assume.
|
| They should choose the best tools for the job, even if it's not
| there own.
|
| - Edit - It looks like WebView2 is a Microsoft thing based on
| their Chromium browser version. Super common for Microsoft to
| make multiple competing products that do similar things.
| sivakon wrote:
| Word/Excel run natively on Windows and MacOS. Also have a web
| client for them. How does that justify using web technologies
| for cross platform development?
| mattferderer wrote:
| I believe Word/Excel have a really old code base. The web
| tech versions of them are very different applications with
| different feature sets. They're about as similar as VS Code
| is to Visual Studio.
|
| I think Microsoft is trying to move towards a cross
| platform for everything from what I've seen. They have a
| ton of legacy stuff though.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Are they using react-native?
| nailer wrote:
| No react Js. Web view 2 is still a web view backed by Chromium
| thrower123 wrote:
| There's still a lot of Angular in there right now. Presumably
| standardizing on one stack will trim a not trivial amount of
| bloat out.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Doesn't make any sense, especially since they created
| https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows
|
| Can we stop using document formatting as applications? We're
| also not using Word with OLE/COM/ActiveX objects to do video
| conferencing.
| rubyfan wrote:
| Of all the things to fix with Teams, Electron isn't it. Our
| company forced us to switch from Slack to Teams. We have it the
| benefit of the doubt but are regretting it every day.
| Collaboration is down vs Slack and we're all less happy. Sounds
| small but little things effect morale.
| richardstephens wrote:
| Drop Electron.... for Edge Webview2. I mean, okay sure, half the
| memory is an improvement. But what is going on in the chat
| industry that everyone's converged on Electron? You'd think
| Microsoft of all companies would be able to figure out how to
| build native apps. If I want a chat service with native apps, it
| seems like my only option is IRC.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Native anything is a lot of work for not a lot of gain as most
| users of Teams are forced to have it.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Why bother integrating it into the operating system itself
| then? That's also a lot of work for something that people are
| forced to install anyways.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Or you can just pitch proper integration as a Windows 11
| feature, to give companies another incentive to upgrade
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Is it all that integrated besides being pre-downloaded?
| Bancakes wrote:
| These are trillion dollar companies, I'm sure they can afford
| to lead the software industry for the greater good.
| Mary-Jane wrote:
| What 'greater good' can possibly be achieved by having to
| literally write the same app 5 different times?
| Bancakes wrote:
| Going through the sunk cost of making 5 different GUI's
| and maybe wrapping some syscalls/API for the same 90%
| core app, resulting in minimal resource usage. It's the
| correct computerscientific approach and companies like
| Microsoft can (and should) commit to it. Breaking changes
| nowadays are too few and far between.
| hulitu wrote:
| You have work to do. And you get paid. No work - you're
| fired.
| ratww wrote:
| They could at least be trying to use the native multi-
| platform technologies they have bought/developed, like
| Xamarin or MAUI.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I don't think RAM conservation is high on anyone's list of
| initiatives to improve the world. The resource consumption
| of Electron is mostly of interest to computer scientists
| who like to see how small and efficient they can make
| something. But in this case, it does not really matter.
| hulitu wrote:
| > The resource consumption of Electron is mostly of
| interest to computer scientists who like to see how small
| and efficient they can make something. But in this case,
| it does not really matter.
|
| It matters to sysadmins. Some people need to also work on
| the computer and when Teams uses all memory they will
| close it.
| ratww wrote:
| No. It also matters to the users of the laptop and to the
| people who have to buy it, as using too much RAM can lead
| to slowness due to swapping and can make older laptops
| unusable.
|
| It's basically having a third-party forcing programmed
| obsolescence at your device.
| therobot24 wrote:
| >> half the memory is an improvement
|
| would call it more than just an "improvement", only using 1/2
| memory is pretty freakin great when you're already known for
| hogging mem
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Easiest way to get these big percent improvements? Make sure
| your starting point is ridiculously wasteful.
| [deleted]
| viraptor wrote:
| There's also Ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ which is tiny,
| native, and works with slack. Going with electron is a simple
| way to get quick results so companies like it.
| richardstephens wrote:
| I had not seen this, I'm definitely going to try it out. How
| often do changes made by Slack break it?
| smcnally wrote:
| Core text chat function has been solid for me the last 2+
| years on Ripcord on macos and ubuntu. Image handling,
| search, notifications, e.g., have varied for Slack and
| Discord channels.
| sdwvit wrote:
| They have to support 5 platforms. Porting Electron app is just
| as easy as checking if chromium supports the platform.
| tyingq wrote:
| My guess is that because they also have to maintain a web
| version of Teams, it cuts down the amount of work
| significantly.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > If I want a chat service with native apps
|
| But why?
|
| 'Native' is a tool, not a goal, surely?
|
| What's the underlying goal you want to achieve, and do you
| really need native to achieve that?
| richardstephens wrote:
| For me personally, it's having a set of UI widgets as
| consistent as possible with everything else on the platform
| as the primary concern. Secondarily it's performance /
| battery life.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| As someone who switches between three platforms, I like
| that Electron apps are consistent and in sync. Back in the
| day when I was using Skype, I could never get used to
| either.
|
| I don't know what Slack or Teams would look like with
| native UI components, but I am pretty sure I would consider
| it inferior to what we have at the moment. The possibly
| improved performance and memory footprint would be nice but
| not enough for me to care about.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think this argument used to make sense to me as well, but
| since most apps I interact with are web apps in browsers
| these days, most of my interactions aren't with native
| widgets anyway and I don't really care anymore.
| cudgy wrote:
| Many of us have been bludgeoned by web apps to the point
| of not caring any more ... most web apps are slow,
| twitchy interfaces that shift constantly and the industry
| loves it because it allows them to utilize the armies of
| (used to be cheap) web developers but at a heavy cost to
| the user experience
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think this has long stopped being a design goal. The OS
| is not the primary platform any more which everything
| orients around, it's an access point to the web. Products
| are determining design language now.
|
| People don't expect Google to look 'like Windows' just
| because they're on a Windows OS, they expect Google to look
| like Material apps across all platforms. There's not
| 'windows spotify' or 'android spotify' but they expect the
| app to look the feel the same everywhere, and in that way
| companies actually benefit from using Electron.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| In my experience the people who decide these things talk
| about branding. Not user expectations. Phone, tablet, and
| desktop apps have different interfaces anyway. And few
| people use more than 1 desktop OS and 1 mobile OS
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _What 's the underlying goal you want to achieve_"
|
| Responds to user input quickly enough to not be frustrating.
| ByteWelder wrote:
| Native is not a tool, nor a goal. Native is an implication of
| a user experience and performance. Very few non-native
| applications provide the same experience and performance as
| native applications (although there are exceptions and it's
| not always black and white).
|
| "Native" is the implication that a certain level of
| comformity is present: the user generally gets an experience
| that is similar to other native applications.
|
| As you develop with native APIs, and when you follow the best
| practices for the platform, you end up with a product where
| the UX is much easier to grasp for the user. Non-native
| solutions very often have different UI/UX patterns, which
| leads to users having to learn these patterns before the
| application becomes understood by them.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > the user generally gets an experience that is similar to
| other native applications
|
| This sounds like the goal you want to achieve using native
| as a tool.
|
| But anyone who struggles to grasp non-native UI and UX is
| going to struggle to interact with the modern IT
| environment as there is no standard for web-apps.
| ptx wrote:
| If I order a cup of tea, you could argue that what I
| actually want is to achieve the goal of drinking
| something which has the taste, smell and general
| nutritional profile of tea.
|
| Theoretically, there might exist a cup of coffee that
| achieves this goal. But I've never seen one, and if you
| serve me coffee it's almost certainly not going to
| achieve my goal.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _What 's the underlying goal you want to achieve_
|
| Performance, small bundle sizes and native UI widgets. And
| judging by all of the Electron apps failing in these
| departments, I guess you really do need native apps.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > small bundle sizes
|
| Space are not precious anymore. Nor is bandwidth.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Says who? A Surface Laptop 4 comes with a 256 GB SSD. And
| the Surface Pro 7 comes with a 128 GB SSD.
| criddell wrote:
| Something that's a resource hog will likely consume a lot
| of battery as well. That's a big deal for something you
| want running all the time.
| toast0 wrote:
| BestBuy sells some Windows laptops with 64 GB eMMC. Space
| is precious on those. Chrome devices often ship with 16
| GB; if Microsoft could make Windows viable at that size,
| they could push the absolute low end prices down a smidge
| and keep more users.
|
| I get 60 Mbps down and an upgrade would be $50k.
| Bandwidth is relatively precious to me.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > BestBuy sells some Windows laptops with 64 GB eMMC.
|
| I would suggest that people are likely not attempting to
| use enterprise-grade collaboration software on these
| machines, so that's not a problem.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Except it's not enterprise-grade.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/17/22439924/microsoft-
| teams-...
| betaby wrote:
| Both are very expensive on mobile.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| It's the memory bloat that stands out to me. Many modern
| laptops have 8GB of RAM. (Curiously this number hasn't
| really changed in the last 9 years.) 500MB of bloat isn't a
| trivial fraction of that.
|
| Also, an application that runs constantly in the
| background, is under a greater obligation to make efficient
| use of system resources.
|
| > judging by all of the Electron apps failing in these
| departments, I guess you really do need native apps.
|
| I'd put that differently: solutions heavily based on web
| technologies seem to consistently fail to be anywhere near
| as efficient as solutions that use conventional toolkits.
| (Sometimes someone will suggest this isn't true if the web-
| based solution is well implemented, but they are never able
| to give an example of such an application.) On most
| platforms, Qt doesn't count as being truly native, but it's
| still far more efficient than Electron.
| eloff wrote:
| Native apps means essentially building at least 5 distinct
| apps: windows, mac, iOS, linux, android. What a mess to work
| with and maintain.
|
| We already have cross-platfrom UI engines called browsers and
| they're very advanced and reasonably pleasant to work with
| these days. If you bundle the browser (electron) then you don't
| have to worry about differences between browsers. So electron
| makes plenty of sense to developers, even although it's an
| egregious resource hog.
| dreyfan wrote:
| Microsoft is a $2T company, I feel like they could afford to
| do it right.
| eloff wrote:
| Regardless of what the financial markets value them at,
| their resources are proportional to profits, not market
| cap.
|
| That aside, they also have lots of products and teams and
| some have more budget and resources than others.
|
| Saving some memory usage in teams for more than double the
| development costs, is probably an unattractive position for
| that team. It also makes it hard to keep features
| consistent across platforms (as it is, teams struggles with
| that!)
| hughrr wrote:
| Apparently they favour fucking it up several times.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Balance-sheet aggregation != perfect execution consistency.
|
| - DOS 4.0
|
| - Microsoft Bob
|
| - Windows ME
|
| - Windows Vista
|
| - JScript
|
| - MSJVM
|
| - Zune
|
| - Eliminating all/most easter eggs
|
| https://www.infoworld.com/article/2612971/microsoft-s-13-wo
| r...
|
| You can make many, many mistakes as a giant company, so
| long as they're not fatal. ;-)
| onion2k wrote:
| The market cap doesn't tell you anything about the
| available resources a company has.
|
| For example... Gamestop's market cap did this recently - ht
| tps://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/marke.
| .. - the company doesn't suddenly have more money to spend
| on projects.
| eloff wrote:
| Not a great example since they sold over a billion worth
| of stock. They do actually have more money now.
|
| Microsoft generates more money than they know what to do
| with so they return large amounts in dividends and
| probably stock buybacks (I haven't checked for MSFT
| specifically, but it's all the rage these days.)
|
| That's essentially the opposite of what GME did.
| notatoad wrote:
| really 6 distinct apps, because building native mac and
| windows apps doesn't mean you can drop the web version.
| vletal wrote:
| Most UI developers I know says that it's "reasonably
| pleasant", yet the is a shortage of "reasonably good" web
| developers on the market.
| ksec wrote:
| >We already have cross-platfrom UI engines called browsers
|
| Someday we compile to WASM and have UI rendering on top of
| WebGPU?
| octopoc wrote:
| It has been discussed but you're right it won't be any time
| soon:
|
| https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/273
| richardstephens wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, but Microsoft already builds
| an entire office sweet as native apps across 4 of the 5
| platforms you enumerated.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Which means they know extremely well what a costly and
| complex process it is.
| machello13 wrote:
| And the result of that knowledge is a worse experience
| for users. However you frame it, users are losing because
| MS doesn't want to shell out the cash for good UX.
| asdjlkadsjklads wrote:
| Losing, but still buying in.
| machello13 wrote:
| The users aren't really, their bosses are, most likely
| because it gets bundled in a contract with Office and
| Exchange etc.
| richardstephens wrote:
| I'm not denying that it's a complex or costly process,
| just lamenting that they don't care enough. Of course,
| the problem is compounded for me by the fact that at any
| given moment I end up having 3 different enterprise chat
| apps open on my work laptop for collaboration with
| outside parties.
| Demiurge wrote:
| Perhaps the effort/reward they get from office release does
| not apply to a freemium chat service that's constantly
| updating?
| tgv wrote:
| But the mac version has never been the same as the Windows
| version.
| venfen wrote:
| Actually the Office team is integration more and more React
| components in the office programs.
| ripley12 wrote:
| Outlook is switching to WebView2-based UI like this soon.
| As for Excel, here's its PM saying "When you look at the
| overall allocation of resources on the team, a huge
| percentage is working on web app improvements" https://twit
| ter.com/jones206/status/1388162347059978243?s=20
| eloff wrote:
| Office is special because it's such a cash cow they can
| afford to make 4 different versions of it.
| madhadron wrote:
| We also have Swing in Java which is mature, performant, and
| works across all our desktop stacks. Mobile UI is different
| enough that you need to write a different interface anyway.
| Longhanks wrote:
| In other words: outdated, ugly and barely supports modern
| requirements such as high dpi. Apart from Jetbrains who put
| in a literal buttload of engineering, there is not a single
| Java Swing application that is not an absolute PITA to use.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I don't think that connecting the 4 buttons of functionality
| in 5 frameworks is all that much work, when the bulk of the
| work is backend. Also, it is a trivially scalable problem,
| where you can just throw 5x as many people at it.
|
| I get the popularity of electron and other cross-platform
| tools for small startups, but for Microsoft..
| potatolicious wrote:
| > Also, it is a trivially scalable problem, where you can
| just throw 5x as many people at it.
|
| Having done exactly this work it's really not as simple as
| throwing 5x as many people at it.
|
| Though to be clear, I am an advocate of native apps on each
| platform and am not a fan of "wrap a webview around it"
| type fake-apps. That said, we need to be honest about level
| of complexity here.
|
| The problem with maintaining 5x native apps is not just the
| cost of hiring 5x as many people - as you scale towards
| more platforms the inter-team coordination overhead
| increases exponentially.
|
| The complexity of coordinating 4 teams to ship in lockstep
| on 4 separate platforms isn't double the complexity of 2
| teams on 2 platforms.
|
| There are a bunch of intersecting factors here:
|
| - product management has extreme load - new features need
| to be designed for every supported platform at the same
| time, increasing complexity in feature definition. Some
| features aren't _possible_ on some platforms, so that
| increases scope and complexity of the features as we
| include fallbacks or exceptions.
|
| - engineering has to happen (roughly) in lockstep with one
| another. It's not acceptable to ship a new feature only on
| Windows and not Android - they don't have to launch _on the
| same day_ , but neither can they launch a year apart. This
| means you have multiple engineering teams that basically
| have to move at roughly the same speed, even though they
| are developing on completely differently platforms.
|
| - underlying platform changes affect your ability to move
| in lockstep - iOS and Android both have significant yearly
| updates that create additional testing needs. Both
| platforms also introduce more significant OS-level features
| that you want to add support for than the older/more mature
| platforms like macOS or Windows. This throws another wrench
| in having your teams progress in unison.
|
| There are real advantages to cross-platform frameworks,
| even though I dislike them from a UX perspective. In
| particular I have beef with the use of web views, which
| while offering incredible consistency between platforms is
| probably the least CPU/RAM efficient way to do literally
| anything. A huge part of why computers feel slower than
| ever is the pervasive use of web views for _everything_.
|
| I really, really wish we had a better cross-platform
| solution than a thing with an ill-defined render cycle,
| bases literally all rendering on an XML-like structure, and
| has all processing stuck to a single thread on an
| interpreted language. Yikes.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Thanks for this POW!
| rado wrote:
| How can an organisation start a Web/Desktop project which can
| never ever be _good_ (not to mention great) and frustrate and
| annoy its customers all the time? If native is a mess, how is
| outsourcing the mess to the user justified?
| eloff wrote:
| What's the alternative? Be only on one platform? Not viable
| today. Implement 5 different apps, usually not viable.
|
| The platforms are fragmented and the user pays the costs of
| that in the end, one way or another.
|
| If you hide it by increasing development costs, the price
| of the app ( or amount of ads or premium only features)
| must go up to compensate and the user pays the cost as
| well.
|
| Edit: downvote all you like, there is still no magical
| solution.
| anoncake wrote:
| Microsoft easily has the resources to write 5 chat app
| UIs.
| [deleted]
| eloff wrote:
| That's a hopelessly simplisitc way of looking at the
| situation. Every team at Microsoft has different levels
| of resources, and some would rather spend those resources
| improving their product rather than writing and
| maintaining 5 different versions of the frontend part of
| their product.
|
| That's typically the smart choice.
| anoncake wrote:
| I really don't care about Microsoft's internal
| organization or what team has how many resources _right
| now_.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > What's the alternative? Be only on one platform? Not
| viable today. Implement 5 different apps, usually not
| viable.
|
| Why are we pretending in this thread that there aren't
| any cross-platform toolkits?
|
| Using that is an entirely valid trade-off between
| "putting a webshit in its window" and "you have to
| develop 10 separate native apps".
| eloff wrote:
| Are you talking Qt? Xamarin?
|
| Those are pretty sucky by comparison to both web and
| native and they don't feel native.
|
| The problem is not that cross platform toolkits don't
| exist, it's that they're aren't any good enough.
|
| Also why are we pretending in this thread that it's
| impossible to write electron or web apps with more
| reasonable memory usage? Look at vscode.
|
| Electron, as much as I hate to say it, is one of the best
| options available.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The Qt apps I use are much better than the Electron apps
| I use.
|
| It must be very hard to write Electron apps with more
| reasonable memory usage if VS Code is the sole example
| anyone ever has.
|
| Sublime Text is my reference for reasonable memory usage
| and performance. VS Code doesn't measure up.
| jon-wood wrote:
| If only Microsoft had a app development framework designed to
| allow developing apps for multiple mobile + desktop platforms
| with as much shared code as possible.
|
| https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/xamarin
| fomine3 wrote:
| This is how MS divided.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Yep, we moved away because MS themselves are simply not
| serious about it.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Cross-platform development is like communism. An
| unattainable utopia. There's no "magicking-away" the
| idiosyncrasies of cross-platform development with
| abstraction layers. It's simpler to use native tools and
| go for the best each platform has to offer while keeping
| the L&F UX as similar as possible.
| rauchp wrote:
| React Native and (arguably) Flutter are going through a
| golden age right now. Major companies like Tesla,
| Coinbase, and Shopify have adopted them, and the
| developer experience has never been better. I'm not sure
| why it worked now, but didn't work for Xamarin / Ionic,
| though.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Popularity means popularity. It doesn't mean utility.
| There are plenty of dumb things large companies use.
| OTOH, there are also many unsexy, little-known,
| ubiquitous technologies essential to certain sectors of
| the economy.
| eloff wrote:
| It's really sad to me that Xamarin doesn't get more love
| and adoption.
| js4ever wrote:
| It's slow, bugged as hell and the result is subpar
| compared to a real native app... At least it was like
| that when I tried it (again) 3/5 years ago
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| My SO just finished a term project that used
| Xamarin.Forms. Conceptually the framework is _perfect_
| then you actually use it and want to off yourself. MAUI,
| if taken seriously and isn 't only a rebrand, could be
| quite an accomplishment and a great tool.
| bigbob2 wrote:
| I'm not sure about the state of Xamarin Forms these days,
| but back when I worked with it a few years ago even the
| sample apps had memory leaks on iOS. I agree that
| conceptually it was amazing, as was Xamarin itself. If
| Forms doesn't have leaks these days it would definitely
| be a great way to build cross-platform apps.
| manigandham wrote:
| There's a new project called MAUI that also handles
| desktop: https://github.com/dotnet/maui
| marwis wrote:
| It's basically rebranded Xamarin Forms. Outside of
| bundled Windows apps, Microsoft is going all into web
| technologies for consumer apps now. Even within bundled
| Windows apps usage of .net is almost nonexistent. Built
| in OneDrive client is written in Qt!
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| When and where it's a priority: creating a solid user-
| experience takes _effort._ If a project can 't manage that
| when it matters, then their product or service is also going
| to suck in so many other ways their users will notice. Then
| native or not, it won't matter when everyone hates them.
|
| Mac and iOS are relatively-straightforward, aren't terribly
| different, and share development resources.
|
| Android (Kotlin) doesn't often lead to suicidal ideation.
|
| Windows is meh.
|
| Linux is so-so.
|
| > So electron makes plenty of sense to developers
|
| To mostly _front-end_ developers who don 't know much about
| the world outside of a browser.
|
| > , even although it's an egregious resource hog.
|
| Violating nonfunctional requirements to be usable,
| performant, and efficient.
| eloff wrote:
| > To mostly front-end developers who don't know much about
| the world outside of a browser.
|
| Just for the record I'm a senior backend developer, who
| sometimes operates at CTO level in startups, and I suck at
| front-end development. But still electron makes sense to
| me. Or react native if it's mobile only.
|
| The state of cross platform development is pretty bad.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| It wasn't directed personally. The tendency is for front-
| end developers (the bulk of developers numerically) to
| treat software development like RMS does with emacs:
| everything extends from their perspective without
| consideration of perspectives or paradigms beyond their
| own. Embedded, native, real-time/mission-critical/fault-
| tolerance, resource-constrained, widely-compatible,
| ASIC/FPGA, and/or production-/shipping-scalable.
|
| Cross-platform development will never be improved by
| N-times duplicated effort of abstraction layers on-top.
| The best that could happen is for OS developers to agree
| on common interfaces like UNIX/The Open Group for low-
| level operations, but for high-level media, UI, and
| common native development APIs more integrated than a
| patchwork of libraries like Qt, LibUV, etc.
|
| I've worked on nuclear reactor simulators in F95,
| embedded industrial GPS equipment, deadline-oriented ad
| server meta-mediation, Fortune 500 client-facing
| consulting, compilers, functional programming projects,
| and now earn a paycheck doing SRE/PE since it's easy
| money to fund side-hustles.
| olliej wrote:
| Electron fails to support even the most basic Mac behaviours,
| every electron app is immediately recognizable and
| frustrating.
| nlitened wrote:
| If I understand correctly, Telegram has native apps on all
| platforms, and they are super fast and slick.
| richardstephens wrote:
| Telegram's mac app is pretty good at least, but I don't think
| it's a serious contender for any 100+ seat company.
| drclau wrote:
| I think GP's point was that it's doable (ie. providing
| native apps for all platforms), not that Telegram is a good
| replacement for Teams scenarios.
| samat wrote:
| They are the one example of messaging done right on the
| client side.
|
| And it maddens me that their whole team, including ops and
| backend is like 50 people.
|
| At the same time, they used some pretty unconventional ways
| to find brilliant people. For example, for iOS and Mac and
| android apps, they simply held a contest for the best open
| source app fitting succinct and reasonable requirements. The
| winner got sizable prize and place on the dev team.
|
| Then they released that app as a Telegram X and then
| gradually sunset the older app.
|
| Pretty neat on multiple fronts.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Yep Telegram the app is perhaps one of the best pieces of
| software I have used. It really shows what a good team can
| pull off.
| ratww wrote:
| _> And it maddens me that their whole team, including ops
| and backend is like 50 people._
|
| But that's how they get so much accomplished. Fred Brooks
| was correct in 1975 and is still right in 2021. Throwing
| headcount at a problem only delays it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > and is still right in 2021
|
| That's a huge understatement. When development tools
| improve and people get more productive, that observation
| gets more and more correct.
|
| Thus, he is much more correct now than he was in 1975.
| And he was pretty much right by that time.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I've never used Telegram, but I suspect the Teams integration
| with SharePoint/Office365 and the (terrible) way Teams tries
| to be cake icing and floor wax by integrating file store,
| wiki, document library, telephone, whiteboard, plugin app
| ecosystem and webhook scripting environment with Windows ACLs
| makes it more complex than an independent chat/call/video
| call program?
| kaba0 wrote:
| Perhaps a bit? But as others wrote, they have 50 people.
| How many does Microsoft have (and of course, Google,
| Facebook are also bad at it)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Microsoft has 160,000.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I loathe Teams and its laggish
| bullshit nature as much as the rest of the pitchfork
| wielding people in this thread, it's just that it's not
| apples-to-apples comparison with a pure chat/call client
| and the headcount needed to develop it because of how
| much extra junk is hiding in Teams.
| mindri0t wrote:
| I agree with your point however it just goes to reinforce
| that part of the failure of teams is that it kind of does
| a lot of things but it does all those things really
| badly. If they had some notion of a product vision, some
| focus, some opinions and executed on those with a users
| first attitude then it might not be in such a sorry state
| and it would probably be a whole lot easier to deliver
| great native experiences. IMHO a big part of the problem
| is this idea of just throwing features at applications
| without designing an actual product that seems to be
| extremely popular but always dreadful. Do less and
| deliver excellence, don't do everything half arsed and
| throw more adverts at the resulting problem.
| billti wrote:
| The article says Electron is a memory hog because it is based on
| Chromium, but so is WebView2! As it is based on the new Chromium
| version of Edge.
|
| It's still not clear how the switch results in half the memory
| use then (though I'm happy to see it!)
| Matthias247 wrote:
| It might have the savings on by windows which already loads
| Edge for other purposes
| wila wrote:
| It's because they control the whole stack.
|
| FWIW, I'm currently finishing up an ActiveX wrapper for
| WebView2 so that it can be consumed in a way similar to the old
| IE WebBrowser control and so far I'm pretty impressed.
|
| To give you a basic idea. I'm running the control embedded and
| the WebView2 control consumes about 60MB after navigating to my
| own -mostly text- website. Browsing within that control to the
| page of the hacker news topic makes the RAM usage go up to
| 130MB. Navigating back to this hacker news comment page and the
| memory usage drops down to about 75MB.
|
| So yes, I'm impressed by how well it works.
|
| edit: Another huge advantage. Last week I upgraded MS Edge and
| WebView2 is also upgraded. So the control is kept up to date
| and not depending on an external dependency that might end up
| being a security nightmare.
|
| The control itself continues to work fine.
| sofixa wrote:
| > : Another huge advantage. Last week I upgraded MS Edge and
| WebView2 is also upgraded. So the control is kept up to date
| and not depending on an external dependency that might end up
| being a security nightmare
|
| Or disadvantage if you look at it from the developer's point
| of view - they have zero control over the browser version, so
| if there's a bug, or lacking feature, or something
| deprecated, you're screwed.
| wila wrote:
| It's a COM interface they can't deprecate without changing
| the interface.
|
| re. "zero control".. you can set a minimum version that you
| require for your application. If Microsoft creates a bug
| then yes, you might have an issue. But that counts for the
| whole stack anyways.
| adzm wrote:
| > I'm currently finishing up an ActiveX wrapper for WebView2
| so that it can be consumed in a way similar to the old IE
| WebBrowser control and so far I'm pretty impressed.
|
| To what extent are you maintaining compatibility? The old
| mshtml provides com bindings for pretty much everything. I'd
| be interested to see what you have if you end up releasing
| the code. I would love for the old Trident / mshtml /
| edgehtml engines to be made open.
| wila wrote:
| Not very compatible with the old IE WebBrowser control I'm
| afraid. That was on my list of things to try, but it just
| isn't feasible.
|
| With mshtml you could directly access the DOM and do pretty
| much anything in there via its interface.
|
| With WebView2 there is no direct DOM access. You have
| access to what is running in the browser, but it is all via
| javascript. I'm building a bit on top now to get some
| basics to the developer without getting their hands dirty
| in javascript, but for Microsoft clearly the idea is to use
| javascript to manage the DOM.
|
| re. releasing the code. Sorry, it will be a commercial
| undertaking. I will release the control, but it won't be
| free.
| godelmachine wrote:
| This is great news!
|
| When will Firefox do the same? Asking this since many years now.
| imglorp wrote:
| Teams is a compliance product for some CIO to check a box and get
| their kickbacks and bonuses. Its features center around corporate
| control of conversations.
|
| So whoever has a negative comment about usability has absolutely
| missed the target customer for Teams: it's not the end user and
| certainly not software people.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I have noticed that most people I see who have not had a good
| experience with Teams are coming from Slack. Could it be like if
| you have learnt Vim it is hard to move to Emacs and vice versa?
| My company love Teams and don't struggle with it. For me the
| killer feature is the deep integration with Office. In many
| businesses Word, Outlook PowerPoint and most of all Excel are
| where people spend their days. SSO, deep integration, that is
| what enterprise IT wants.
| adolph wrote:
| Given the love for VSCode, is Electron a real problem for Teams?
| rapsey wrote:
| No. There is no reason for Teams to be the dog that it is other
| than it being terribly written.
| adolph wrote:
| Blaming a poor user experience on "being terribly written"
| seems to be nearly a tautology except that I'm sure there's
| been beautifully written software that was otherwise as bad
| as Vogon poetry.
|
| Teams tries to do a lot of functions. Maybe too much?
| aszen wrote:
| Apparently it was written in AngularJS, yes the old angular
| version. Which may explain the performance or the lack of it
| aszen wrote:
| Now they are switching to react
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Is this just son of Active X?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| What, you mean like Mozilla's XP/COM?
| riffic wrote:
| lipstick on a pig.
|
| Teams is not very good.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I wonder if/when this will effect MacOS Teams.
|
| My 2015 MacBook, despite being old, is generally just fine for my
| web development work -- the one notable exception is Teams, it is
| almost unusably slow for me. I hadn't yet investigated whether it
| was a RAM/swap issue or other. But it's the only thing I have to
| regularly use (per employer) that gives me trouble.
| dagw wrote:
| I have a top of the line Thinkpad with Windows 10 Pro, 64 GB of
| RAM and a 6 core Xeon CPU. If it makes you feel any better,
| Teams is slow and annoying on my machine as well.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| It runs like garbage on macOS. 2019 16", if Teams is open the
| rest of the OS also starts to degrade in performance.
|
| Teams is basically unusable except making or answering a call.
| jstsch wrote:
| Everyone is talking about memory usage. But for me it's nuts how
| much CPU Teams is using when doing a video chat. Facetime video
| calls are barely measurable, CPU-wise, whereas a 1-1 call with
| Teams can easily occupy more than a full core. Quality and
| latency are much better with Facetime too.
| nailer wrote:
| If it works they'll probably do vscode next
| darksaints wrote:
| Thanks for the improvement, but half the memory is still about 5x
| as much memory as it needs to use.
| CharlesW wrote:
| FWIW, Slack is just as bad. Looking at RAM usage while running
| both on macOS, Teams is at 490 MB and Slack is at 500 MB.
| zerop wrote:
| Going by comments here, I think most people find the Teams awful,
| then why are companies moving from Slack to MS Teams. Is the cost
| the main factor?
| Medicineguy wrote:
| I think so, yes. I could also imagine that business people: 1.
| see effort in integrating Slack/Matrix/.. . into their
| landscape 2. think MS is a big name and thus will build a
| proper product 3. see no big difference in terms of
| functionality.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Yes, you get Teams for free as part of Office 365.
|
| Sadly no one has run an analysis to see how much cost there is
| in reduced communication because of how bad Teams is.
|
| If it were measurable I bet the cost of teams actually far out
| weighs the cost of Slack.
|
| I'm leaving my current role in Wednesday and I'm so happy to be
| leaving Teams behind, I hate it.
|
| I ask if companies are using Teams now when interviewing and
| it's a mark in the "cons" column if they are.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I completely and utterly think it's MS abusing their monopoly
| position (again). Slack, Zoom, etc, all cost actual hard money.
|
| Microsoft released Teams for effectively for free, paid for by
| existing (extortionate) subscriptions (that are never in the
| public domain). Now, despite the product being almost
| _universally_ hated by its users, it's number one.
|
| Urgh.
| Krasnol wrote:
| From my personal experience people are moving from nothing to
| Teams.
|
| Welcome to Germany.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Does that mean it'll be Windows-only?
| moogly wrote:
| Looks like they're porting it to macOS and Linux:
| https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _MS Teams Switches from AngularJS to React, Ditches Electron._ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27633756 - June 2021 (63
| comments)
| xvilka wrote:
| Maybe one day they will discover Qt framework too.
| sircastor wrote:
| A few years back my company put out reqs for Qt devs because we
| were pushing hard to do some POCs with Qt frameworks. We had a
| hard time finding those people. I don't know if it was location
| or compensation or what.
| jopsen wrote:
| Unless you need to make a really complicated UI, do you
| really need Qt devs?
|
| I did a custom widget for editing petri-nets in Qt (no QML),
| you just need competent devs, whether you have Qt, GTK, or
| winforms experience doesn't matter.
| nguyenkien wrote:
| Onedrive app use Qt
|
| https://forum.qt.io/topic/87898/microsoft-onedrive-sync-uses...
| darksaints wrote:
| Qt is about as ideal as you can get for cross platform apps.
| Unfortunately the licensing is an impediment for a lot of
| usecases.
| drclau wrote:
| So, Microsoft should buy Qt then.
| zvrba wrote:
| Yeah, and support it on .net.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| Please, no! They would fuck it up somehow, and then abandon
| it after a few years. Qt has been very stable and
| dependable for.. ages. MS has created and forgot then
| forgot too many frameworks during the same time.
| sircastor wrote:
| Couldn't they just buy a commercial license?
| solarkraft wrote:
| Or something like it, maybe something already running on
| .net ...
| BadInformatics wrote:
| Funnily enough, Microsoft does use Qt for parts of the OneDrive
| UI: https://forum.qt.io/topic/87898/microsoft-onedrive-sync-
| uses.... What that says about the state of UI framework
| fragmentation on Windows is up to interpretation.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Electron came out of Atom, which came out of GitHub, which
| Microsoft now owns. Obviously Microsoft is a vast empire and
| there's no reason every team will adopt other teams' work, but it
| seems curious to hear that electron was dropped for what's
| effectively the same tech (chromium rendering a web app).
|
| The article tries to explain why Edge Webview2 is better, but I
| don't find the explanation very compelling. Chromium doesn't seem
| to be the problem, because both technologies use chromium. So is
| it the Node bits? Configuration of chromium inside of electron?
|
| From the outside looking in, I find it curious that they didn't
| just change Electron to do whatever magic they wanted it to do.
| Certainly they have the expertise and resources.
| hirsin wrote:
| Teams was built on Electron a long time before Microsoft
| purchased Github.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Does that matter? Microsoft employs probably all of the
| foremost experts on Electron right now. The decision to move
| away from electron didn't happen before Microsoft bought
| GitHub.
| dstaley wrote:
| I think there's two reasons memory usage is lower. First,
| WebView2 is essentially just another tab in an already running
| browser process. If they're not pinning to a specific version
| of WebView2, they're reusing the host machine's copy of Edge,
| which I believe is always running now, so startup latency is
| reduced. I think their numbers don't include the memory usage
| of this "always on" instance, and only count the Teams-specific
| memory usage. Second, Microsoft has done a lot of under-the-
| hood work to reduce memory usage of Edge on Windows that hasn't
| made it upstream into Chromium, so I suspect that gives them an
| additional decrease in memory usage simply by switching from
| Chromium to Edge-Chromium.
| axutio wrote:
| I'm wondering how swapping Electron for another Chromium backend
| will allow them to halve the memory usage. Is Node the main
| reason that Electron uses so much memory? Or is the Chromium
| renderer poorly optimized to the extent that it's using double
| the memory needed?
| oscargrouch wrote:
| You must remember that each Electron instance will have its own
| gpu and browser process.
|
| If you do just like Chrome, one host process + one gpu process
| and all the rest are renderer process as it was meant to, you
| will use less memory.
|
| Im working on something that are meant to enable native
| applications with a Chrome-based platform, and it was one of
| the first thing i've tried to achieve.
|
| Electron was just being sloppy and stick with its first MVP..
| because being able to centrally control things through a
| process like the Chrome browser process does, give you a lot
| more functionality to explore, compared to what Electron is
| doing where each host/browser process is isolated and don't
| know about the other players.
|
| Its akin to use a cannon to kill a fly..
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Not sure what everyone issues are. I use Teams (in the browser)
| on Linux and it works fine under both X11 and Wayland (with some
| work). A bit less polished than Slack but it also has a lot more
| features.
|
| The worse thing about the desktop/Electron version is that they
| are really bad about keeping the electron version updated so the
| browser version will support screen sharing on Wayland while the
| desktop app doesn't.
| CharlesW wrote:
| In my experience, most people in engineering orgs default to
| hating Teams far more than it deserves. and loving Slack far
| more than it deserves. This has roots in Microsoft's history as
| computing Bad Guy and Slack's pre-Salesforce history as Scrappy
| Indie.
|
| Teams is more complex than Slack but also does more, but it's
| also not a complete superset of Slack, so unplanned/unguided
| transitions from Slack to Teams tend not to go well. Like any
| sort of knowledge management change, it can go well with
| empathy, planning, and care.
| spystath wrote:
| In reality the Linux and web versions are not similar to the
| actual Windows client. For instance the Linux version is stuck
| to 2x2 video streams at best, doesn't support background
| blurring, audio/video quality is inferior, doesn't support
| sharing a single window, no breakout rooms etc [0]. None of
| these are of any considerable importance to me but Linux or the
| web has never been priority for Teams nor will ever be. In fact
| I will not be surprised if/when Linux is dropped completely
| when transitioning to Webview2. Judging by the "PR-speak" [1]
| this is what probably will happen anyway.
|
| [0]
| https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/645...
| denysvitali wrote:
| If you can't wait for Teams 2 for your platform, maybe you can
| check out my project, teams-cli [1] or the new (WIP) Matrix
| Application Service [2]
|
| [1]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli [2]:
| https://github.com/fossteams/matrix-teams-as
| cudgy wrote:
| Tools like Slack and Teams are focus-killers and should be banned
| from all companies that want to work efficiently. The synchronous
| nature of these tools and the chatty blather they encourage
| should be avoided by all serious knowledge workers.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Compared to people calling or finding me at my desk they are
| extremely asynchronous.
|
| What tool do you suggest for teams?
| cudgy wrote:
| Simple ... email ... I choose when/if I will respond on a
| schedule that I define and My response can be more complete
| therefore avoiding many of the roundtrips that these tools
| support and encourage. If someone needs a meeting, they can
| schedule a meeting from open time that I have provided in my
| schedule that is shared to my team.
| dagw wrote:
| The "chatty blather" is a culture 'problem' (assuming you see
| it as a problem), not a tools problem. Where I'm working now we
| only have channels directly connected to specific projects and
| only people working on those projects are on those channels,
| and there is no project irrelevant chatter happening. There are
| no company wide channels and no 'off topic' channels so very
| little social banter takes place on Slack or Teams.
|
| Personally I think the problem is over-rated and wouldn't mind
| if there was a bit more off topic chat going on in our
| Slack/Teams.
| cudgy wrote:
| What is the purpose of the tool then? What improvement does
| it have over email?
|
| The main problem that I have with these tools is the
| increased number of distractions. There is an expectation
| when using a chat tool that someone will respond promptly,
| but this rarely is useful for the person that's receiving the
| question.
|
| For most knowledge workers, frequent distractions come at a
| very high cost. Notions that we are good at multitasking are
| completely false. Encouraging the use of these tools is
| contrary to the goals of deep intelligent work And in fact
| can encourage poor planning and time management.
| dagw wrote:
| _What improvement does it have over email?_
|
| One is that everything gets sorted under the right project
| subheading. Discussions about Project FooBar end up in a
| different channel than discussions about Project Blork. The
| second is that I can just post on the Blork channel and
| know that everybody currently connected to project Blork
| will see it. Equally if I'm not actively working on FooBar
| I can easily ignore everything connected to FooBar, and
| just scan through what's happening every other day or so. I
| personally feel it's useful keep an eye on what is
| happening in projects tangentially related to what I'm
| working on without being CC:d on every project related
| email sent, and Slack makes that easy.
|
| Of course all this can be replicated with mailing lists,
| email filtering, and decent threading support in your mail
| client, and perhaps that might even be better, but for
| whatever reason the tools for easily doing this aren't
| really being pushed. I'm sure you could build some sort of
| tools on top of email that gives you most of the benefits
| of Slack but with a slightly less synchronous feel.
| cudgy wrote:
| There were tools called bulletin boards or wikis created
| decades ago that can accomplish what is described above.
| All of these chatty tools require discipline by those
| making posts to not refer to other projects within the
| silo of the channel. I've found this to almost never
| happen. Email allows for normal conversational
| encompassing communication method that does not rely upon
| siloing information about projects into their respective
| channels.
|
| For example, if Blork and FooBar Projects are related In
| a comment that is made in one of the project channels, it
| is not easy to navigate their relationships in these
| tools Without explicitly adding tags to refer to the
| other channels. All these tags then create a spiderweb of
| useless links for the most part, and the information flow
| is weird and difficult to follow in many cases. This
| model can be advantageous for example when referencing
| checkins or other tickets within comments of a bug/story
| reporting system. However, bug reporting systems
| typically have fewer parties involved in the comments, so
| things don't get quite as out of hand.
| dagw wrote:
| _There were tools called bulletin boards or wikis created
| decades ago that can accomplish what is described above._
|
| Far be it for me to defend Teams, but one thing it does
| kind of right is to automatically create a wiki, a
| project tracking and a file share page in addition to the
| chat space for each project so that you can, if you want,
| use the right tool for the job.
|
| That being said I worked at places a decade ago that
| tried to do the internal bulletin and wiki thing for
| their projects, and for whatever reason, it never worked
| anywhere near as well as I've seen Slack work. So while I
| agree in theory with many of the complaint levied against
| Slack as a productivity tool, in practice I've yet to see
| anything work better. But it is also clear that, for
| whatever reason, I haven't experience many of the time
| wasting antics that other people seem to be describing.
| anoncake wrote:
| Maybe that's why companies use Teams? Because people only use
| it when they must?
| g051051 wrote:
| I intend for it to use 100% less memory.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Does WebView2 expose an API to add primitives directly to the
| JavaScript interpreter, or must you do everything by sending JSON
| messages?
| wila wrote:
| You can send javascript directly to the WebView2 control [1].
|
| [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.we...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >public System.Threading.Tasks.Task<string>
| ExecuteScriptAsync (string javaScript);
|
| That's what I mean by sending JSON messages, but I'm asking
| if there is a way of directly calling native code from the
| JavaScript interpreter, synchronously passing pointers to
| JavaScript data structures back and forth, not just copying
| strings back and forth between separate processes through an
| asynchronous message queue.
|
| Like Microsoft's deprecated COM/OLE/ActiveX, or Apple's
| Objective C / JavaScript bridge, or what SWIG does for
| JavaScriptCore, for example:
|
| https://steamclock.com/blog/2013/05/apple-objective-c-
| javasc...
|
| http://www.swig.org/Doc3.0/Javascript.html
|
| For example, how can I get direct read/write access to the
| pixels of an html canvas or the memory of a JavaScript byte
| or float array, instead of serializing images as png files or
| base 64 encoded strings, or buffers of numbers as decimal
| text json arrays?
| wila wrote:
| There's this [1] and the C++ variant here [2]
|
| So far I have not yet investigated what can be done with
| that. It looks a bit promising (and complicated).
|
| Microsoft's deprecated control had the mshtml document
| interface and that was indeed very powerful.
|
| The Async script capabilities give you a lot of power, but
| I agree that the asynchronous part of it is a huge pain and
| is causing me extra headaches as it is basically preventing
| me from creating the API I want to create.
|
| [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/dotnet/api/microsoft.web.we...
|
| [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
| edge/webview2/ref...
| pubudutr wrote:
| The teams UI is so fragile that I often end up reacting an
| embarrassing emoji on random messages. A single meeting usually
| drains the entire battery. I can't imagine how this kind of
| application gets passed QA and shipped.
| Ristovski wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if one of the issues is all the testing
| being done on very powerful machines. "It's plenty fast on my
| machine!" is the new "It works on my machine!"
| edhowzerblack wrote:
| Teams is shit.
| raspyberr wrote:
| Teams is an embarassing piece of software. I use it on work
| laptop - a Microsoft surface. The laptop is Microsoft branded and
| all their software is so slow. Clicking to change chats is 1-2
| seconds of delay. Opening office files is 1-2 seconds of delay.
| Opening calendar in outlook is 1-2 seconds of delay. Everything
| is so laggy and 90% of the time all you want to see is text.
| Ctrl-F search through Teams defaults to non-exact search.
| nullify88 wrote:
| I've recently switched to the browser based client
| https://teams.microsoft.com and ditched their desktop
| application as I grew frustrated with its extremely slow UI.
| The browser client is more responsive, consumes less CPU and
| RAM, and uBlock some of the tracking javascript.
|
| I can live with some of the missing features:
|
| No noise cancellation
|
| Audio devices are configured via windows sound settings
|
| Can only share full screens and not individual windows
|
| Standard Windows notification sounds and not the Teams sounds.
|
| Maybe missing more otherwise its more or less the same app.
|
| I've installed it as a Chrome App and it has its own window,
| task bar icon / shortcut and generates notifications.
|
| I'd suggest others to try it out.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Thanks for this! Looks to be a game changer for my
| productivity and sanity!
|
| I was about to get a second device for teams. Performance has
| degraded so badly that it's now impossible to pretend to be
| in a meeting and run an IDE / office apps / factorio at the
| same time.
| Ristovski wrote:
| > Can only share full screens and not individual windows
|
| At least on Chrome, the Teams screen sharing option summons
| the Chrome screen sharing dialog, which allows you to select
| either the whole desktop, individual windows or specific tabs
| inside the browser. Maybe the limitation is from the browser
| you are using? (Although I would be very surprised)
| npteljes wrote:
| The delays in Teams kill me inside. I press the up arrow to fix
| an error, wait for editor to initialize, then wait for the
| cursor to move to the end of the text, then edit the typo and
| re-send. The waiting part is 500-1500 ms. The overall
| responsiveness is abysmal.
| raspyberr wrote:
| In fact I once timed getting into a Teams meeting from turning
| the computer on and it took pretty much exactly 5 minutes. FIVE
| MINUTES. The laptop has an SSD how is it five minutes?
| [deleted]
| fabiospampinato wrote:
| I'd like to see an independent check of this claim, like 50%
| memory reduction, but under what circumstances?
|
| If that's at startup when the app doesn't consume a huge amount
| of memory that's not a particularly interesting claim.
|
| If that's after hours of app usage when the previous Electron app
| used to consume let's say 1GB that's really impressive, but if
| the app is consuming 1GB of memory it's because the app itself is
| allocating a huge amount of stuff in the heap, you can't just
| swap browser engine under the hood and cut that in half with no
| downsides, otherwise every browser maker would do just that.
| hulitu wrote:
| > I'd like to see an independent check of this claim, like 50%
| memory reduction, but under what circumstances?
|
| You have 32 GB RAM ? Teams will use only 16 GB.
|
| > If that's at startup when the app doesn't consume a huge
| amount of memory that's not a particularly interesting claim.
|
| Of course it's at startup. Then the app needs to draw its ugly
| black window and it needs more RAM. It uses HW acceleration,
| you know. And it's slow like hell.
|
| > If that's after hours of app usage when the previous Electron
| app used to consume let's say 1GB that's really impressive, but
| if the app is consuming 1GB of memory it's because the app
| itself is allocating a huge amount of stuff in the heap, you
| can't just swap browser engine under the hood and cut that in
| half with no downsides, otherwise every browser maker would do
| just that.
|
| Every respectable browser will use the whole available memory.
| From time to time they will have a patch to halve the memory
| usage but they will recover quickly.
| bla3 wrote:
| Electron and Edge Webview2 are basically the same: they both wrap
| Chromium in the end, possibly with some downstream changes. So
| this is primarily a branding exercise, and maybe and admission
| that Microsoft isn't upstreaming some improvements to Chromium.
| Havoc wrote:
| We've got Win10 tablets at work with 8gb. Having teams open makes
| everything else slow to a standstill.
|
| I find myself literally confirming that yes I have already
| scrolled down in excel during a screenshare...lets just give it a
| couple secs to actually scroll. You'd think we're back in dial-up
| era
|
| How does a Microsoft app, on a Microsoft OS on Microsoft hardware
| perform so incredibly badly?
|
| No way Microsoft is dogfooding this. If they did they'd have
| nuked it from orbit years ago.
|
| Teams 2...sure. I hope they carry over zero lines of code.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| Hopefully they'll make it easy to be signed into multiple Teams
| accounts at the same time. Currently, you have to use a script in
| order to launch multiple Teams instances [1].
|
| [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-
| teams/multi...
| eaa wrote:
| By the way, you can sign into multiple accounts in Teams for
| Android.
| suyash wrote:
| Native apps area always for the most part going to be better than
| web app, electron is a poor choice of technology. JavaFX would
| have been better for cross platform development if not C++.
| jarym wrote:
| I had this issue with Teams where if I pasted code from VSCode
| (even just a 1 liner) it'd add a NUL character to the end and
| when pasted back into VSCode by the recipient it would mess up
| the JS file (no longer able to load properly in a web-browser).
|
| Just don't understand how MS can mess up simple copy+paste so
| badly.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Just don't understand how MS can mess up simple copy+paste so
| badly.
|
| They have years of experience in this field. I always keep a
| Notepad window open - to be able to copy paste properly.
| beebeepka wrote:
| As if Electron is the actual problem hay. I am forced to have
| this junk running on my work PC at all times. As far as I know,
| everyone hates it.
|
| I only know a couple of people who like it and I definitely don't
| value their input since we disagree on pretty much everything
|
| I know Discord is supposed to be for gamers but I've only used it
| for work and it's hands down the best thing out there
| dafelst wrote:
| It seems to me that Electron is a scapegoat here - VS Code is
| built on Electron and is super snappy and responsive for me,
| even on large projects. This means two things:
|
| 1. Even complex Electron apps can be performant and responsive
|
| 2. Microsoft as a company has people that know how to make this
| happen.
|
| The reality is (speaking as a former MSFT employee) that the
| Teams and VSCode orgs are so far separated that they might as
| well be in different companies. The average quality of devs and
| their respective management chains varies WILDLY across
| organizations, and given how shitty Teams has been and
| continues to be, I think it's fair to say one or both of these
| factors is at play here.
| est wrote:
| Everytime Electron is mentioned, VSC will be presented as
| counter example. The problem is VSC is the only snappy
| Electron app out there, Microsoft spend millions optimizing
| it, while most other Electron apps are crap.
|
| Native programs can be made snappy _easily_. That 's the
| whole point.
| dafelst wrote:
| But then with native you have to pay the cross platform
| price. Which is higher do you think?
|
| With Electron you get cross platform more or less for free
| and ostensibly you can make it faster later.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love doing native work, but as
| someone who has to deal with cross-platform issues in
| native applications (well games) on the daily, I can tell
| you that even with massive code reuse and good interfaces,
| that cost is incredibly high.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _But then with native you have to pay the cross
| platform price. Which is higher do you think? With
| Electron you get cross platform more or less for free_ "
|
| Don't pay the cross platform price. Stop developing
| inferior software for your core users so that other
| people on other platforms can also have inferior
| software. It's not a good tradeoff, it's a bean-counter's
| tradeoff.
|
| It's like going to a steak restaurant and finding they
| only sell lettuce so vegans can eat there, or going to a
| bar and finding they no longer sell alcohol because
| they're trying to appeal to tetotallers who don't like
| bars. It's like Ferrari putting a Honda Civic engine in
| to try and appeal to both sets of customers and the Honda
| customers don't want the six figure price tag and the
| Ferrari customers don't want a low power reliable
| 4-cylinder engine. It's the "one size fits nobody very
| well" of software, it's the abandonment of your core
| competency to appeal to people who hate you.
| dsego wrote:
| A handful of people make Sublime Text, which is as good
| if not better than VS Code. It can be done.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I mean, you are talking about making a goddamn text
| editor faster -- it's just ridiculous. There should be no
| lag whatsoever when it comes to UIs in 2021.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| Building a text editor across platform with exact the
| same behavior is somewhat a thing that you almost always
| to redo "everything" in different platforms.
|
| It isn't very unseasonable to just relies on something
| that already do most hard works for you.
|
| If you must use some "native" alternative. It is probably
| something like GTK/QT. But I doubt do they actually have
| the ability to do such complex edit behavior and layouts.
| kaba0 wrote:
| > It is probably something like GTK/QT. But I doubt do
| they actually have the ability to do such complex edit
| behavior and layouts.
|
| They actually can - QtCreator for example. Also, I really
| don't think that the web would be the panacea of UIs, on
| the contrary.
|
| But I otherwise agree with you - text editors are
| surprisingly hard. But I still don't really get the why
| for teams. It could even just add a webview for the
| actual meeting part, but let the rest be something
| actually workable.
| JCWasmx86 wrote:
| > But then with native you have to pay the cross platform
| price. Which is higher do you think?
|
| You could for example use Qt. It is cross-platform and if
| you write your application well, the amount of platform-
| specific code will be quite small.
|
| >With Electron you get cross platform more or less for
| free and ostensibly you can make it faster later.
|
| It's not for-free. The effort/work for the developer is
| reduced, while the amount of work for the users' PC is
| increased. Sure, a lot will think, that this is a great
| deal, but at in my opinion, you should do it the other
| way round.
|
| How often have you seen electron apps going faster? I
| never did. With a native toolkit, you have performance
| from the beginning for the same quality.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I use Discord for family communications, it's great. We even
| have a #shoppinglist channel.
| [deleted]
| hakube wrote:
| We're using Discord at work and dumped Skype and Teams. It's
| been a blast
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I still use Skype, as Discord is missing a feature I use.
| With Skype people can call me using a landline and I can dial
| out to landlines. It would be cool if Discord added VoIP
| landline support and could even transfer numbers from Skype
| to Discord.
| mynameismon wrote:
| You might want to check Guilded (https://guilded.gg). Has
| most features of Discord, along with calendar and wiki
| channels.
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(page generated 2021-06-26 23:02 UTC)