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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

I love how when you go to enter a Zoom meeting, they bury the no-install, run-in-browser link in small type in a footer. And then, if you manage to see the link and use the browser, they withhold "Gallery View", forcing you to deal with the extremely annoying "Active Speaker View".

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> they bury the no-install, run-in-browser link

I wrote a browser extension that will transparently redirect all zoom links to user their web client:

https://github.com/arkadiyt/zoom-redirector

love this extension. we recommend it for everyone at work as the zoom client is banned.

What do you then do about the horrible performance of zoom in chrome?

For me, the sound becomes unintelligible as soon as someone shares his screen.

Try a different browser. On Mac, Safari is much more resource efficient than Chrome for example. On Windows I'm not sure, but it can't hurt t give FF a try.

Last I checked FF was not even supported :)

Looks supported now

It has been supported for at least a month, probably two. I didn't (have to) use Zoom before that, thankfully.

N=1, but it works great in Firefox on Linux and doesn't use noticeably more resources that what I usually see with video calls.

Haven't had this problem. And in general, we try to get people to use whereby (also the web version), which we've been very happy with.

You recommend using the extension to circumvent your employer banning your use of Zoom, while at work?

He said they banned the zoom client, not the zoom service.

It's wild to me how many companies are happy for everyone to have that client installed, despite usually having otherwise completely onerous security policies in other areas.

That's brilliant, thank you for making me aware of this!

Thank you.

I thought they removed the in-browser link? Does your extension still work?

According to a different comment it is hidden by default.

Likewise, I could swear that the first couple of times I had to use Zoom there was a clean/clear/large font option to "use web", and after some time they must have removed it (or changd the font to white and set it to 3).

I use WindowsFirewallControl (WFC) by BiniSoft (think ZoneAlarmPro) and "Allow" very specific executables to reach the internet. In that case, the Install/Uninstall.exe would cause an alarm, and I would (of course) "Block" it.

I know this is not a solution for (ahem) elderly, but it can work for the majority of 'us'.

The in-browser link is hidden till you click the button to launch the zoom client app. Then, the link appears.

> The in-browser link is hidden till you click the button to launch the zoom client app. Then, the link appears.

As someone who doesn't use Zoom, this gobsmacked me.

Btw Zoom account manager can enable this "Join from your browser" link, to show it to all participants. It's hidden by default. This is what I did in our org:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383-Show-...

> I love how when you go to enter a Zoom meeting, they bury the no-install, run-in-browser link in small type in a footer.

I wasn't even aware that was possible until now.

In my experience, that link only appears after you actively deny the opening of an external application (xdg-open alerts pop up), after 3 tries it will _finally_ appear. Quite infuriating.

True. But there is an option to show it by default. Though it is not easy to find. And only the manager of the host account can do it.

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115005666383-Show-...

Have you tried disabling Javascript? The "Join from your browser" URL follows a predictable format, only a slight variation from the meeting link. If you have a meeting link that someone sent you, you can create the web client URL yourself.

I paste meeting ID (eg 99999) on this address:

https://zoom.us/wc/join/99999

The web version also won't allow the host to request control from what I can tell. I use it daily for remote support because new webex sucks and no one knows what jitsi is.

Do you really think controlling your local desktop is an API feature that web browsers should provide to web apps?

Stated "Should local desktop control API be widely available to web apps and be commonly used?", the answer is surely no.

"Should local desktop control be a feature that can be enabled through web browsers for users who choose to use it with certain sites?" Eh, this is not so clear. What if by some magical turn of events Zoom decided on a drunken whim that user privacy is very important, and strongly encouraged use of web over desktop, should they just axe that feature? Back in reality, Zoom couldn't even consider that course of action until the web supports it.

Maybe do it by requiring users to install an extension that's granted remote desktop permission for a particular site. Which would at least allow the extension to be reviewed and audited.

Chrome Remote Desktop does it (requires a browser extension though I think).

And the browser extension runs a native .exe file behind the scenes...

For remote support, you may want to look into a more purpose-built system, such as TeamViewer or LogMeIn Rescue.

If youre ok trusting smaller companies, AeroAdmin is a working alternative. https://www.aeroadmin.com/

Last time I spoke with TeamViewer, they still wouldn't admit they were hacked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826431 (TeamViewer denies hack after PCs hijacked, PayPal accounts drained)

Yep, switched my parents off TeamViewer after that and have blacklisted it personally.

That hack would have required the persistent login features to be installed on the target computers.

For simple remote support, you shouldn't be doing that anyway.

Chicken-and-egg etc. People will know what Jitsi is when you use it with them. It's so simple, why not have them use it? Why do they have to know it already?

When Teams breaks, it's Teams's fault. When Jitsi breaks, it's your fault.

Been using jit.si for months with extended family (up to ~7 connections), not broken yet.

Same, approximately. I got one literal grandma to use Jitsi, and all of my literal grandparents to use BigBlueButton, and the latter actually took effort. Jitsi is significantly easier to use than Zoom et al., requiring no account or anything but a browser even to host a meeting, and having an extremely intuitive UI compared to eg. Zoom, with eg. the "Raise Hand" button being a hand icon right on the bottom bar next to mute, etc. where there’s just empty space in Zoom, instead of buried under a "Participants" button. BigBlueButton is slightly less simple (eg. you need to log in to host, at least by clicking “Login with Google” or with Twitter or Microsoft) but both have worked flawlessly over dozens of meetings and been understandable to my grandparents.

Then you are lucky. It breaks frequently (but randomly) and when it does, it's almost impossible to debug unless you have access to the broken machine (and that is unlikely given that you're probably at home and so are they).

Breaks how? I've used it on about 6 devices personally, roughly a couple of times a week and all our extended family have used it on one or two devices - Win10, iPad (I gather), Android, and Linux.

If it breaks a lot we must have been exceptionally lucky for none of us to have problems.

"It works on my machine" was generally the feedback I got from the server maintainers as well. It's true that only a few people had problems, but those people were the kind of people that needed to be listened to when they said "Jitsi doesn't work so we need something else". The problems in Jitsi were impenetrable for me and anyone else that looked into them, so saying no wasn't an option.

MS Teams has the same behaviour in web client. Is it browser-level restriction?

Google Meet has tiled view on web.

(And Jitsi Meet and BigBlueButton, and according to another comment here Discord, and in my limited experience with Cisco WebEX web at least ≤7 people can be simultaneously visible there)

I love Jitsi and have a server VM at home for my personal use.

But while it can share a desktop view I didn't think it allowed control?!? Man, this could be a family support game changer...

Edit:

requires Electron app it seems. https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases

Was on HN, some comments suggest the Electron app bundles Chromium.(Not sure if all Electron apps do this, I know nothing about Electron..yet.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22830846

Edit sub basement 2: Yes, Electron apps include Chromium. "it combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js runtime."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)

All Electron apps are Chromium-based.

Sorry, just figured that out for myself and edited my parent comment again. Thanks!

> And then, if you manage to see the link and use the browser, they withhold "Gallery View", forcing you to deal with the extremely annoying "Active Speaker View".

Is this a browser limitation or something? I think microsoft teams has the same issue.

I’d guess as much as they love us installing their software, it’s also just really hard to solve these types of problems when you’re restricted to the browser.

I don't think so, Google Meet has gallery view and that's browser only.

Discord also has a gallery view for web, so it’s definitely technically possible

Browsers do generally have a limit on simultaneous outgoing connections per domain[1] - it could be related to that. (This is also why e.g. TFS breaks down when you open too many tabs).

[1] https://docs.pushtechnology.com/cloud/latest/manual/html/des...

I doubt that has anything to do with it. Zoom almost certainly handles composing the image for gallery view server-side; you're not maintaining a separate connection for each participant.

I thought i read somewhere that they don’t, which is what makes them more performant.

It's possible that the server just forwards a selection of packets from each participant (hopefully dropping some from those who aren't speaking or moving) and the client stitches them into the view.

Sure, that would be the SFU doing it's job, but my point is that you aren't maintaining a connection per participant, but one connection with Zoom itself where you get all the video data. It's true that could be in the form of a single video stream of the entire gallery, or separate streams of only the participants visible to you.

Google Meet does send each video participants video stream seperately. You can tell this by disconnecting internet and then clicking a (now frozen) participant - they become fullscreen but low-res.

That means the client must have had that data locally rather than needing to wait for the server to send it.

Do you happen to know why TFS causes this? Does it leave connections open in each tab? Otherwise it should not matter how many tabs we have open I think.

Jitsi supports multiple videos, I've had at least 6 people before.

We use GoToMeeting at work, and many times have 20 people with video, plus screen sharing (there's also gotowebinar which supports thousands of viewers).

With GTM I love that you can seamlessly share without disabling your video. The web browser experience is hands down better overall then everything else I've used (Zoom, MS Teams, Slack, Jitsi, WebEx). Camera views are just auto-sizing, auto-layout boxes (think: floating tiles) that fit the space you give them, and you can pick top/bottom/left/right when someone is sharing a screen.

Then things that hold GTM back: they still push their native client, and it takes two clicks every time to join with browser (it's not buried like zoom, but it's nowhere near the instant-on, zero-effort of Jitsi). The other thing driving me absolutely mad right now is they introduced a bug a few weeks ago that causes it not to remember my audio settings or name. When I host a meeting, despite telling it to "remember me" it never does -maybe this is part of the federated login my company uses, but the end result is when I click to start my meeting it tells me it's waiting for me to arrive, add takes like 4 more clicks and bouncing around login sites to get in.

My ideal:

Run in a browser, use extensions to get extra functionality if needed.

With lots of people, switch to multiplexing and/or automatically downscale video.

Support seamless pstn dial-in, and pop up a suggestion about this to users if their audio starts breaking up.

Don't stop my webcam when I start screen-sharing.

Support active speaker view, gallery (zoom-style), or GTM-style.

Remember all my preferences and make it so I rarely have to think about any settings. Or login.

Make it easy to give people permission to control/share/etc, and for recurring meetings, remember those changes for next time.

> Support active speaker view, gallery (zoom-style), or GTM-style

I prefer Jitsi’s gallery style — that lets you scroll through the participants with your actual scroll wheel — to Zoom’s — forcing you to drag your cursor back and forth across the screen’s longest axis every time you want go back a screen of participants after advancing one, or vice-versa.

They do have a Chrome App that will run zoom in Chrome with gallery view, but they hide that even more thoroughly unless you're on ChromeOS: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zoom/hmbjbjdpkobdj...

To be fair, Chrome apps are ending next year. https://blog.chromium.org/2020/08/changes-to-chrome-app-supp...

Maybe they'll be forced to make a usable web version by then, but I doubt it.

Nah, just one less thing to worry about by letting it go by the wayside.

I wonder if that's a technical limitation - it's the same for Microsoft Teams. When used through a browser, you can only see one person at the time. To see everyone you have to install the app locally.

Web version wouldn't work at all for me. I had to install the app.

Meeting hosts can make a setting change that makes that link visible by default, so you don't have to cancel xdg-open twice (only once)

can't

Can't what?

Holy shit - you can run Zoom in the browser???

Yes, of course. People wouldn't be crazy enough to install the binary blob of this extremely sketchy company, would they!?

My zoom shows up recording audio in the audo mixer even after leaving meetings.

My elementary school students’ Chromebooks’ Zooms keep the webcam light on when they click the Zoom button to turn it off.
https://my.fsf.org/give-students-userfreedom

every teleconferencing app does this.
Teams will not show you a browser link until you download the web client.
webex will actively download a .exe (on my mac?) before showing the browser link.
When I see stuff like this, I think "market opportunity" but the status quo must be pretty profitable.

webex (1).exe
webex (2).exe
webex (3).exe
...
After a Windows update webex kept crashing and bringing my laptop down with it, so I started using the web app. My Downloads folder ended up with quite a few webex downloads. Now I have a script to clean them out each night.

Can’t you just block downloads for domain in browser?

I always thought it depends on the call host.

It makes sense for them as a business to convert visitors to users to customers - nothing wrong with that for me.

Sadly, we live in a world where our expecations are a bit screwed. We're used to so many things being free, ranging from music streaming to programming libraries to nearly every service. We've become acustom to the world where so many things are free to use that people get annoyed when products make the free things not as enjoyable as the paid service. Or sometimes even when someone provides a paid service.

Whether or not your company pays for Zoom, you still get the same severely limited web version and a strong push to use apps.

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