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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone think that now is Microsoft's best chance to revive Skype as a household name synonymous with chat and video calls? I doubt anyone would want to use any chat app from Google anymore, Facebook is getting really bad PR which could affect WhatsApp as well soon enough. Signal and Telegram are good alternatives but lack marketing muscle. Slack and Discord are mainly used for group chat in professional and gaming circles.

Skype was almost a genericized trademark meaning video call, that seems to have been taken over by Facetime to some extent. If Microsoft would make it easy to chat with friends and businesses from the same app, and threw some fresh paint on it, they might take some of the market back.

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They could... if their own messaging strategy wasn’t almost as bad as Google’s. Skype just got a top-to-bottom redesign that everyone hates, and Teams (which may or may not be the replacement for Lync, or Skype for Business, or whatever it’s called now) is like a checklist of everything terrible about Electron applications: it’s slow as molasses, uses boatloads of memory, and has no integration with the host OS. It’s actually worse than Slack, which is an impressive feat!

There’s something hilariously tragic about this being the perfect opportunity for Microsoft to deliver Google a coup-de-grace on messaging, and they can’t do it because they’re just as incompetent.

I use skype right now to chat with some friends and it actually works really well for me. Cross platform, video calls, captioning now available is really awesome.

Does it work from within a browser yet? Last time I tried, installing Skype was a surprising hassle on my Windows machine; there were at least two versions being offered through various Microsoft channels, and they appeared to have different feature sets, and I couldn't tell which one of them I ought to be using or if one was deprecated. Discord has spoiled me with chat that Just Works on the web.

Try https://preview.web.skype.com/

It is the universal Skype written in React (works natively on windows and electroned on other Desktop OSes)

> Browser not supported

> Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web (Preview) experience.

> Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer.

That is on up to date Firefox on Debian unstable. Bravo.

Yikes, did not know that.

Same result on current Firefox with Windows 10

"Universal": Browser not supported

Use Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome to access Skype for Web (Preview) experience.

Alternatively, download Skype on your desktop computer.

When in doubt, use the desktop version. To be honest, its a very simple decision in the windows world, and I'm not sure what tripped you unless you're nee to windows.

... captioning?

You mean, Speech-To-Text that gets forwarded to the NSA, otherwise used by Microsoft for who-knows-what while the transition to an ad company with Win10 ?

Sounds great, but I don't think that's going to be a good alternative for the people who are looking to dump Facebook/WhatsApp/Google over privacy concerns.

Yep, that one!

Useful for people that are deaf and hard of hearing....

It really doesn't work well. I tried making a simple call with web skype with my parents the other day; neither them - android tablet - nor me - linux desktop - could accept the call when video was on by default. We couldn't turn video on if we initiated a voice call either, because it immediately crashed and stop the call.

We ended up using appear.in without a glitch.

skype feels too slow for casual messaging. WhatsApp is the best solution right now - both messaging and video/calls.

I don't know anyone who uses it as their casual messaging client, and I've never used their mobile app. But looking at it now it looks decent, and if they wanted to they could probably match their competitors pretty quickly, if they're not already. The rest is mostly marketing, I'm thinking they could use their reputation as a reliable long term partner to their advantage, and maybe promise to not use peoples contacts to sell ads.

Skype is basically dead at this point, and Microsoft is instead focusing efforts towards its Slack competitor.

Only dead for business, MS is still heavily invested in Skype and just released a major update on all platforms.

Last time I had the Skype app installed it was trying to clone Snapchat and crashed when I tried to message someone. Admittedly that was a while ago, but I'm not sure where they were trying to go with it.

While we are a Google shop for the most part when it comes to messaging, we use Skype for colleagues in China or when traveling there. It is far better quality compared to Hangouts in the Great Firewall.

Discord has eaten skype's lunch. there is no market left to revive too. Skype feels painfully outdated to use in comparison

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