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Comment by suprfnk | Hacker News Reader

As another comment said, this is pretty basic stuff. Though I am not surprised. The Teams client is pretty bad. It's slow and clunky. It tries to do way too much while succeeding at very few things.

The desktop client chat _still_ doesn't have a "reply to message" feature, while the mobile client has had it for, what, more than a year? This is a feature that _should_ cost a competent engineer no more than what, a week? to implement. The team should take a note out of Discord's or Telegram's book to improve the chat experience. It's really very bad.

In the meantime the latest noticeable additions were mostly fluff like extra ways to show webcam stream backgrounds, and a "cinema-like" webcam-view.

It's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good.

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It's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good.

I think it was simply rushed to production. I remember VS Code not being that amazing at the start (slow etc.), but with time, effort and love put into it, it grew to become a competent IDE.

Teams was horrible when it first came out, but I'm noticing some improvements in performance and stability since then.

> It's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good.

Surely this demonstrates the wide variance you get with software and how important professional discipline is?

I would say it does.

I would like to agree here, but to emphasise "discipline" being an organisational not individual issue. Given that there are certainly competent emgineers at MSFT and most could carve out a week of coding without anyone noticing, what is missing is high level organisational insistence on good professional discipline - and it's so easy to just let that slip.

For example a comment earlier mentioned the chat feature is broken but they rushed out video background changes. This of course is a response to zoom - and it's possible to argue it's a strategic necessity - but it suggest the top level product management is blowing around in internally company winds rather than user needs.

> and it's possible to argue it's a strategic necessity

I would argue its a strategic failure. Purely reacting to the competition is something that has led to countless Microsoft disappointments (e.g. Zune, Bing).

Teams is pretty crappy software but it works really well as an integrated chat system and it fits nicely in our organization.

Discord does not have a "reply to message" feature either, it just copies and pastes the message into your input field. You can freely edit the quoted message, and if the user you replied to edits his message, yours won't get updated.

Discord does have this, just not publicly available yet. It's in active development still, see ex. https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/pull/2118

Teams is a Slack competitor not Discord. Slack does have this.

True. I brought up Discord because the comment mentioned Discord.

I don't understand why every advertised feature of Teams can't be done with a web interface, like Slack.

Even with Slack I see no reason for a desktop client, which looks to me like just a widget-less browser running slack.com inside. I didn't need an app for that. And with the web client I can inject JS/CSS as I please (e.g. to prevent sending typing indicators).

just a widget-less browser running slack.com inside

That's pretty much what it is.

The most obvious one is screen sharing - that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser. Also, interacting well with audio and video hardware might need native support.

Discord is another interesting datapoint. You can access that through the browser or natively, but their team has said that the native client means (among other things) better access to audio codecs for better quality audio and things like noise cancellation.

> The most obvious one is screen sharing - that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser.

Browsers have had screen sharing for awhile.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt...

It doesn't work well across all OSs (see the Wayland discussion from a few days ago....) but it is there.

Yeah the Teams webapp supports screen sharing (and does it pretty well)! I particularly like the way Edge (and I assume Chrome) let you choose to just share a specific browser tab.

Video calls through a browser seem really hard to do well. I think that's why so many video call systems like Zoom really push you to download and use their native client.

My kid's school issued Chromebooks for remote schooling and are using Zoom through the browser. It was so bad that I pulled out an old Macbook instead. The Zoom native client running on a 12 year old Macbook works way, way better than running in updated Chrome on a recent Chromebook.

That sounds more like an issue with Zoom and the Chromebook. :/ My ~8 year old desktop works great with video chat in Firefox.

Then again my 8 year old desktop has 32GB of RAM and it is amazing what throwing 32GB of RAM can do to solve problems.

I've actually used video chat in multiple web apps for years now w/o issue though. In theory almost every aspect of video chat should be offloaded to GPU, the browser should just be a dumb canvas to throw pixels at, if that isn't the case then something has gone wrong somewhere in a particular setup. :(

Have you compared it to using Hangouts? I have no problem with the in-browser video quality on Hangouts, and get even better quality using a direct P2P WebRTC link.

I think Zoom is doing its own streaming schengens in the browser with JS and not using the native WebRTC framework for video streaming. It's very possible that they made the web client experience deliberately poor so that they could sell you on downloading the native client, and then spy on you.

> that requires some access that isn't possible through the browser

It is possible:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt...

Google Hangouts allows screen sharing from the browser.

Even if it isn't supported across all browsers, I'd much rather download the latest release of Firefox or Chromium than a proprietary client by Slack.

You know you can use Teams from your browser, right? Go to teams.microsoft.com. Seems pretty full-featured as far as I can tell.

The calls are pretty limited in the Browser. You only have the speaker view with one person and can't use the gridview. And firefox is completely blocked from doing any calls at all.

The Skype client is total garbage as well, so apparently nobody at Microsoft can make a chat client.

Maybe nobody recently, Comic Chat was epic (and certainly guilty of embrace and extend)

> and certainly guilty of embrace and extend

But the only thing it managed to extinguish was itself. IRC long outlived comic chat (and thank goodness for that, IMO).

I talk about the universal law of chat client entropy. Chat peaked in 2000/2001 with AIM and Yahoo. Everything else get worse over time.

Chat isn’t a product that can stand alone, so it’s always attached to another agenda. Skype was an interoperable phone with chat attached. Teams is a SharePoint client that has chat.

I don't think there was anything about AIM/Yahoo that was better than IRC.

Normal people could use it! The UI was pretty simple. IRC at some level had all of the features, but a learning cliff.

My company at the time had E2E encryption with client certificates on AIM.

Right, that's the sadness of it. IRC clients were lacking, and the "auth for free" that came with AIM/Yahoo (and now Facebook) made the difference.

It would have been 100x simpler to create a compelling GUI client for IRC (back in the day, they sort of exist now), than to build an entire new protocol, server infrastructure, and GUI client to support a branded and controlled chat. Never mind multiple competing and incompatible versions of same.

Conflicting interests, obviously. But as a technology, "chat" did not improve materially between 1990 and 2010 or so.

to be fair to microsoft, both Sype and Lync were acquisitions. Lync chat was pretty good before it became Skype for Business

And Skype was a great client before it got turned into a crappy version of MSN.

MSN Messenger was pretty good.

> The desktop client chat _still_ doesn't have a "reply to message" feature

FYI for those who like to reply, you can put a > and a quote box will appear, you can copy and paste the message you wish to quote.

To exit the quote box, type "Alt-Enter" twice

As a datapoint, I use Teams on Linux (desktop app) and I have to say that I love it. I would not say it is slow and clunky as you say.

As another datapoint, I also use Teams on Linux (Mint 20) and although it's generally fine to use, on a couple of occasions it has completely frozen my desktop PC about 1 hour into a meeting and I've had to hit the power button to get going again.

Wait, a client app is able to freeze your Linux computer to the extent that you have to power off your computer?

I would not surprised. The MS Teams client here uses more RAM than all the other programs I have on my desktop, including but not limited to my desktop environment itself (Gnome) and Firefox with plenty of open tabs.

Yep,

I haven't had the inclination to investigate, but I suspect it's something like a memory leak that eats up all the (16GB) RAM and then swaps the system to death. Maybe if I was patient enough I could get an alternative console prompt and poke around, but when you need to get back into that meeting....

The Windows client is really really slow. Nearly every time I click on it and start typing I get about 10 characters in before it pauses and does something for about 15 to 60 seconds, and then I can finish my message when it's done.

I especially like that you have to killall -9 teams to exit it. Installed as official deb from MS.

> It's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good.

In huge companies like Microsoft teams working on completely different products can be as separate as if they were working for different companies.

It's not inconceivable that the first link between those teams is at executive management level.

Having both Teams and Skype, we are slowly depreciating Skype, the one feature I miss most in Skype is that it is very easy to have just a list of who is active and who is not where in Teams you have a list of people you have chatted with but that is different than keeping track of people by favorites.

The “reply” feature is already implemented but it’s been sitting in an internal ring for forever!

Pretty bad is understatement. It is very bad, especially if you are split into two organizations.

> It's interesting that the same company can produce both Teams, being pretty bad, and VS Code, being very good.

The former it develops by itself, the latter has a codebase others are Free to contribute to (as long as they don’t agree to the official binary’s EULA, which isn’t required to use VS Codium).

VS Code is used by the people who write it; this is _very_ significant on resulting quality.

Pretty sure it's the same for Teams

I doubt it. It definitely seems like Teams is not used by the dec team building Teams.

If it is, I feel so bad for that dev team.

I bet this is a situation where even if required, there’s a Slack channel or even IRC server that’s actually used.

What do you think they use then? Slack?

I'm confused, are you suggesting the team that write the code for Teams don't use it?

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