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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

#271

Post by formerly_proven »

eloff wrote: post #163
rado wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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, ther…

> 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".

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

#272

Post by tyingq »

xyst wrote: post #55
bloopernova wrote: post #44

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 lo…

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) +…

I know there's Ctrl-Shift-V, but I use "PureText" on Windows so I can map my own hotkey.

https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

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

#274

Post by dehrmann »

minaguib wrote: post #258
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…

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....

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.

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

#275

Post by dsego »

apexalpha wrote: post #170
bloopernova wrote: post #44

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 lo…

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.

Yeah, what ever happened to their Silverlight platform?

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

#276

Post by dsego »

dafelst wrote: post #149
est wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

A handful of people make Sublime Text, which is as good if not better than VS Code. It can be done.

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

#277

Post by bluGill »

monkeybutton wrote: post #93
chx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ,…

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.

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.

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

#279

Post by chrisseaton »

toast0 wrote: post #248
MattGaiser wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> small bundle sizes Space are not precious anymore. Nor is bandwidth.

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.

> 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.

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

#280

Post by dstaley »

bastawhiz wrote: post #238

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…

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.
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