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Comment by Figs | Hacker News Reader

We tried using Google Meet for work meetings at my university. The experience SUCKED compared to Zoom. There were serious problems like taking 30 seconds to a minute for the screen share widget to popup after clicking the button in Firefox! It was, frankly, unusable for us.

We also tried self-hosting Jitsi, and while that kind of worked, we had some problems getting everyone to be able to connect to it and send/receive audio. It went on the backburner of things to look into more later.

Zoom has a lot of problems, clearly, but it solved THE most important issue: we can actually communicate successfully with it -- as in right now with minimal additional effort. That's why it won.

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after clicking the button in Firefox

A not-so-subtle (and IMHO abusive) effort to get you to use Chrome instead? They've already done that with YouTube's new horrible redesign, it wouldn't surprise me if other Google app-sites were the same.

The state of web browsers is a mess but that's a rant for some other time...

What sort of problems did you experience with jitsi in terms of the connectivity you mentioned?

It's been a few months since we tried it -- so not fresh in my memory any more -- but as I recall, the biggest issue was with audio not working as expected. e.g. you could see people talking in the video feed, but not everyone could hear the audio. I don't think it was just a muted microphone on the other side; my recollection is that some people could hear the audio and some couldn't, but it wasn't clear why not. I remember having to call our group leader by cellphone because he wasn't seeing/responding to the issue in chat and was just continuing on... We did eventually get it working for almost everyone (I don't remember how though, unfortunately) -- but there were two or three people who just couldn't seem to get it to work no matter what they tried, and we ended up going back to Zoom for the next meeting.

Time to learn that minimal additional effort != best solution.

When you drink a soda, minimal additional effort is to throw the can away, but if you think about consequences you'll probably make some additional effort and recycle it.

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