I love how when you go to enter a Zoom meeting, they bury the no-install, run-in-browser link in small type in a footer. And then, if you manage to see the link and use the browser, they withhold "Gallery View", forcing you to deal with the extremely annoying "Active Speaker View".
> And then, if you manage to see the link and use the browser, they withhold "Gallery View", forcing you to deal with the extremely annoying "Active Speaker View". Is this a browser limitation or something? I think microsoft teams has the same issue.
We use GoToMeeting at work, and many times have 20 people with video, plus screen sharing (there's also gotowebinar which supports thousands of viewers).
With GTM I love that you can seamlessly share without disabling your video. The web browser experience is hands down better overall then everything else I've used (Zoom, MS Teams, Slack, Jitsi, WebEx). Camera views are just auto-sizing, auto-layout boxes (think: floating tiles) that fit the space you give them, and you can pick top/bottom/left/right when someone is sharing a screen.
Then things that hold GTM back: they still push their native client, and it takes two clicks every time to join with browser (it's not buried like zoom, but it's nowhere near the instant-on, zero-effort of Jitsi). The other thing driving me absolutely mad right now is they introduced a bug a few weeks ago that causes it not to remember my audio settings or name. When I host a meeting, despite telling it to "remember me" it never does -maybe this is part of the federated login my company uses, but the end result is when I click to start my meeting it tells me it's waiting for me to arrive, add takes like 4 more clicks and bouncing around login sites to get in.
My ideal:
Run in a browser, use extensions to get extra functionality if needed.
With lots of people, switch to multiplexing and/or automatically downscale video.
Support seamless pstn dial-in, and pop up a suggestion about this to users if their audio starts breaking up.
Don't stop my webcam when I start screen-sharing.
Support active speaker view, gallery (zoom-style), or GTM-style.
Remember all my preferences and make it so I rarely have to think about any settings. Or login.
Make it easy to give people permission to control/share/etc, and for recurring meetings, remember those changes for next time.