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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

#321
post #317
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

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

#322
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 th…

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

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

#324

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 no…

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…

> 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)

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Losing, but still buying in.

The users aren’t really, their bosses are, most likely because it gets bundled in a contract with Office and Exchange etc.

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

#326

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.

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!"

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

#327
With all the hate here, where's the web-only, WASM zoom/live/meet killer?

Although it wouldn't be easy, it doesn't seem that hard either! It almost feels like a summer project for interns could do a better job than the current batch of video conferencing services at the moment.

Requirements: - No install, from the web - No login - There is no 3rd requirement

Is that actually hard to build? What am I missing?

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

#328

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.

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.

It looked interesting to me, but their disnhonesty just threw me back:

> Not a subscription—never expires

> Includes 1 year of free version upgrades

Are you telling me that a third-party slack client will keep working forever without updates? The "not a subscription" message here is effectively moot: this thing will stop working and you will need to pay for "another year of version upgrades".

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

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It looked interesting to me, but their disnhonesty just threw me back: > Not a subscription—never expires > Includes 1 year of free version upgrades Are you telling me that a third-party slack client will keep working forever without updates? The "not a subscription" message here is effectively moot: this thing will stop working and you will need to pay for "another year of version upgrades".

Those are the two common models of proprietary software distribution - subscriptions or one-off payments. Did you actually expect lifetime updates for $20 - i.e. the benefits of subscriptions for the price of one-off purchase?

It's not promising you to work forever without updates, but also it doesn't force you to pay if you're happy and everything still works.

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

#330
post #80

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.

The behaviour that still catches me out in Linux is Ctrl-Shift-C starting a call.

The number of times I've been copying between a terminal and Teams and accidentally started a call is really frustrating.

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