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Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

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Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#141

Post by stefan_ »

rjsw wrote: post #122
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #45

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#142

Post by madhadron »

slashdev wrote: post #29
richardstephens wrote: post #7

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.

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 developer…

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.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#143

Post by 52-6F-62 »

qlm wrote: post #73
xyst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) +…

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#144

Post by dagw »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#145

Post by est »

dafelst wrote: post #118
beebeepka wrote: post #38

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

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 m…

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.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#146

Post by cudgy »

dagw wrote: post #137
cudgy wrote: post #102

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.

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…

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.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#147

Post by hulitu »

MattGaiser wrote: post #51
Bancakes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are trillion dollar companies, I'm sure they can afford to lead the software industry for the greater good.

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.

> 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.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#148

Post by hulitu »

Mary-Jane wrote: post #49
Bancakes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are trillion dollar companies, I'm sure they can afford to lead the software industry for the greater good.

What 'greater good' can possibly be achieved by having to literally write the same app 5 different times?

You have work to do. And you get paid. No work - you're fired.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#149

Post by dafelst »

est wrote: post #145
dafelst wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2

#150

Post by KingMachiavelli »

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.

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