Google bans Zoom from employees' computers

We use it internally at Xero, more than ever currently with working from home, and it's been solid from what I've experienced.

Given we also use Google Calendar, joining a meeting is pretty straight forward, as a Meet link is populated in each event, and shows up on the home screen for meet.google.com

Usually the only mic issues that occur are people using their own headsets with audio gain set too high or flaky bluetooth connections

Running in Firefox, it works great for the most part although sadly it breaks every few months. It'll tend to drop me from the lobby a few seconds in with "Network Error" or something along those lines. I would get frustrated but given it's a work tool, a few days to a week using Chrome (just for calls) and Firefox is back in action again.

We also conduct our postmortems via Google Meet and it generally seems to support 50+ person calls fairly well. That said, we use Hangouts Streaming for All Hands type of stuff so I couldn't speak on performance with hundreds of users at once

Purely anecdotal but my coworker has an older HP laptop (specs are still a respectable 8GB ram, presumably quad core CPU) and finds that he can't be on a Google Meet call while also doing development as his fans will flare up too much.

I would actually quite appreciate a Google Meet desktop app (that's not electron) but I guess the premium userbase tend to have enough specs to throw at web-based products

Oh yeah, I do appreciate that Zoom presumably doesn't require any fancy logins because running Google Meet on a phone requires a device policy in order to connect to a call.

I can either install it on my device plainly (requiring a pin to login going forward vs say, a fingerprint) or I could install it in a work profile. The latter is cleaner but then I have an entire second set of apps just to join a call on my phone once in a blue moon :(

At least you can dial into meetings but I find the audio is kinda wonky at times.

Having said all this, I can respect the product but I'm always happy for a non-Google entity to win in any given space ;)

Our church group has been using it with 12-ish participants once a week for several weeks now. There are individuals who consistently have problems, but since it's always the same people, I tend to think they'd have similar issues with Zoom. (Zoom meetings with different sets of people have had similar sorts of issues.)

People are saying that Firefox "technically works" but that due to limitations in the spec, one person in your conference using FF causes everyone else's cpu to go through the roof. (Can't speak authoritatively on that, but FF is labeled as not fully supported.)

Fundamentally, I think it probably comes down to the business model. The company that runs meet.jit.si, 8x8, doesn't make money on that service; they make money selling some large integrated business solution. Running the free service seems to be less of a loss leader than a massive pool of beta testers. So they aren't pushing it as hard as Zoom, where (at least originally) the free version was limited to 40 minutes to directly up-sell you to the paid version.

Two other things about Zoom:

1. Easy to get the client installed, and once it's installed, it's easy to use. Of course, they consistently do that by working around the protections your OS has in place by dodgy methods.

2. It seems to work well in China. Not sure how Jitsi fares in that respect.

EDIT: Some cool things about Jitsi:

1. NO INSTALL AT ALL for desktops. People just click the link and bam, you're in a meeting.

2. Rooms are created when a URL is visited. So if you want so split into two groups, half of you can just add "2" to the URL, and bam -- group is split in two. Ready to join back together? Delete the '2' and you're back together again.

Anyway, all that to say -- I think Jitsi is definitely worth a try. Tell people to use something Chromium-based until they've fixed the issue with FF (I use Brave) and give it a shot.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2159...

There is nothing new/outstanding.

Uh. Are we reading different websites? This is the most vocally anti-everything-FAANG community I've seen on the Internet, since about 2017 or so. Except Apple, mostly.