Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 334 posts

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#51

Post by distances »

aequitas wrote: post #6

Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™. Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now. When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective dis…

I guess it works for some. I've had two Zoom meetings this far, and in both cases the organizer quickly changed to Jitsi as Zoom had distorted audio.

Maybe some incompatible software/hardware at some end? I don't know or even care really, but Jitsi worked well with the same participants both times, while the anecdotal Zoom success rate is still 0% for me.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#52

Post by yardie »

xenophonf wrote: post #28

I missed the part where Zoom is holding people's computers for ransom, or formatting the drive, or exfiltrating sensitive information to criminals or state intelligence officers, or mining bitcoin, or other similarly malicious behaviors. An admin can write to /Applications without privilege escalation? That's a macOS bug. If the operating system didn't rely on an 80s-style put-all-the-executables-in-one-place app lau…

I use MacOS and everything I read in the twitter thread was exactly as expected. MacOS does ask you to escalate. It also asks for privileged access to the camera, microphone, and the keyboard. So when our son had to download and run Zoom for his now online school, I took the opportunity to teach him some basic computer security. Zoom installed into his ~/Applications folder, as a non-admin that was expected. And then it asked for access to his microphone and camera.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#53

Post by gwbas1c »

aequitas wrote: post #6

Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™. Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now. When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective dis…

Good point, but: You can do so much in a browser now. Does teleconference software really need an installed client anymore?

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#54

Post by wodenokoto »

Having never installed Zoom, and honestly not having photographic memory of how the installation process on MacOS is, how is it supposed to look in the installer?

Also, what happened to just dragging the program into the applications folder? I really liked that way of installing apps, but most things seems to have an annoying click-through wizard.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#55

Post by gameofcode »

impendia wrote: post #44
t0mas88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still curious why everyone thinks Zoom "just works" while others don't. Because in an enterprise context it is often hard to download an executable and run it with sufficient permissions. While Google and Microsoft both offer a product that "just works" with only a browser. What makes Zoom more "just works" than that?

I'm a college professor, and I'll share my perspective. For one, Zoom did just work. (At least as a participant, rather than an organizer.) I tried it out, and it immediately worked. It did what all of us were expecting, with no fuss. I also tried MS Teams. It seems designed with a different philosophy: that you use the software to do many different things, and you want them all integrated. (For example, it posted my…

You're right, MS Teams is definitly better placed as an org-wide communication/collaboration tool, not an external one. They really need to make it easier to communicate with people in external orgs, the org switcher is my biggest complaint.

FWIW, IT can allow people in certain groups to make their own teams, it's an admin setting.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#56

Post by JoeAltmaier »

gwbas1c wrote: post #53
aequitas wrote: post #6

Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™. Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now. When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective dis…

Good point, but: You can do so much in a browser now. Does teleconference software really need an installed client anymore?

In theory. But in practice, as a developer you don't want to depend on the browser support for your whole product. Conferencing features of browsers have been pretty lame, compared to what's possible in a professional product.

{edit} My experience: investor took over our startup, made us switch from bespoke technology to web-based conference features. Every feature was compromised, reliability and capacity reduced by 10X.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#57

Post by chadlavi »

aequitas wrote: post #6

Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™. Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now. When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective dis…

Zoom would "just work" if they didn't force you to install software on your computer in the first place. If google meet can do it, zoom can too.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#58

Post by rsynnott »

gwbas1c wrote: post #53
aequitas wrote: post #6

Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™. Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now. When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective dis…

Good point, but: You can do so much in a browser now. Does teleconference software really need an installed client anymore?

Based on my experience with Zoom on the one hand and that Google thing on the other, yes, yes it does.

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#59

Post by wp381640 »

chadlavi wrote: post #57
aequitas wrote: post #6

Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™. Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now. When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective dis…

Zoom would "just work" if they didn't force you to install software on your computer in the first place. If google meet can do it, zoom can too.

Google Meet is terrible, there's a reason why everybody switched to Zoom even in an over-crowded market

Re: How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

#60

Post by freehunter »

reaperducer wrote: post #46
lukevp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use Teams Live for this? We have been using zoom and Teams alternately and Teams performance and ease of use has been much better in my experience, but we have yet to do a 200+ all hands so I was curious if there were some footguns with teams live that you may know about. Teams live works on a lot of platforms and also has a web version.

Why not use Teams Live for this? My wife was on a Teams videoconference last week. 125 people in four locations from New York to Southern California. An hour into it, half of the people were simultaneously dropped, and not from any particular geography. It was random. And nobody could reconnect for a very long time. It took 45 minutes to restart the meeting. The company is no longer using Teams.

To be fair I’ve seen the same thing happen with Zoom. During a 2 hour meeting with a client, about half of my team was dropped and couldn’t get back into the meeting for several minutes.
Post reply on HN