Hacker News Reader

Comment by grahamburger | Hacker News Reader

In my experience Google's Hangout Meetings have been at least as good or better quality and the interface is far superior in my opinion. For example it works in the browser without any plugins (even in Firefox.)

View on HN

I haven't used Hangouts on a professional setting in a while. Does it finally support tile view? Another feature I find really valuable is allowing two windows. One for participant view and a separate one for shared screen.

Nope. Have to resort to chrome extension to get the tile view.

When not in presentation mode.

yeah we use it. Not sure if this is still hangouts or something else underneath, but meet.google.com is the url which allows you to quickly create a session and share it. You can present your desktop using a separate tile.

it does on the hangouts for business (ie google meet) but then only for up to 4 other users

The quality send to suffer when there are a large number of participants.

Which is the reason zoom gets used so much.

My company uses Google meets and it works flawlessly with more than 100 people in a call. Automatic integration with GSuite and Chrome box are an added bonus.

Does it have the advanced features present in Zoom? At my $WORKPLACE we use the Spotlight feature so to ensure everyone is watching the right person (fairly important as we have lots of Deaf people and they all need to be watching the person signing) and Breakouts to set up discussion groups. While we don't have 100+ participants, we do have up to 25 active participants with lots of turn-taking (and not e.g. 100 watching 1 stream). Other platforms we tried didn't have these and made it difficult for participants especially those who aren't great with tech. Also helps Zoom seems to work well with video—other platforms we tried were great for audio so fine if you just need to listen to people but woeful with video making it a no go for meetings involving people who use sign language.

I believe Hangouts pioneered that feature (way back when).

Does everyone have fast computers, great internet connections, and/or use only chrome browser?

Last time I used meet it tended to turn my laptop into a fireball, even with just one or two other participants.

Zoom also works in the browser (though they really push you to the app).

I tried Hangouts recently and the quality was terrible compared to Zoom. Discord was far better than Zoom though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com