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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Wait, are you saying Zoom isn't hated? It's crap. I refuse to install its PoS app and all of the security holes it came with (don't care if they are fixed or not). Launching a zoom meeting in my browser totally bogs the browser down. The zoom site is so slow that proving I'm a human is at least 10x slower than on other sites. In my use case, nobody on the zoom call is even using video, yet it still runs this badly.

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We run zoom calls with over 200 participants and no problems. It sounds like their browser experience is poor, I don’t know if that’s a browser limitation or bad design, but their app on Windows and Mac performs quite well.

Mistakes were made with security early in their product. It’s clear that has turned a lot of potential users against them.

I’m curious why companies like Facebook get more acceptance over terrible security, but other companies are never forgiven

>Mac performs quite well.

This is not my experience at all. Early in the lockdown when Zoom became the darling, I was forced to install their app. Pre-pandemic, Zoom was already panned on this site for crap they were doing, so I pushed back hard against using Zoom before ultimately relenting. Running zoom with a simple 3 person call would bog down my 2017 MBP with fans running full tilt. I've since upgraded hardware and zoom is not allowed to be installed on this computer.

>I’m curious why companies like Facebook get more acceptance

Is there anyone on this site that agrees with that comment? I certainly don't. There are multiple billions of FB users, so I'm quite sure the readers of HN is just a mere rounding error level of numbers.

I've been involved with zoom sessions of up to 50 connections and it has exceptionally flawless on my work macOS laptop from approx 2017. Compared to every other video conference software I've tried, zoom is unfortunately by far the best on macos, Windows and even Linux for video conferencing with large number of participants. I am baffled as to why it performs so poorly—this is not my observation on the machine I have and I also know it works well with on many of my colleagues Macs so it is not just the one Mac I use.

Hard agree. Mac resource use of Zoom is insane. The only machine I've used that feels not bogged way down and blowing it's fans like crazy is my M1 mac and even then it's showing > 50% cpu use. When demoing our app in a screen share on my old iMac 4K the machine would be screaming it's fans and much much slower than normal. Meanwhile Messages screen sharing used less than 10% CPU. IDK what they are doing but it's not right at all.

In my case, Zoom will cause my Mac to heat up quite a lot on each call, using the app.

I also like zoom over the alternatives. Does it have problems, yes but what software doesn’t. I have been using zoom for years (my school switched early) compared to previous tools it just worked and worked well. Yes I know they lied and deceived but again marketing is always full of BS and guess who makes the blurbs we read on the internet about a company. Again the constantly changing UI is annoying but what is better? If someone has something better that even my grandma can use I will give it a shot.

There's a difference between software having problems, and the problems that zoom had/has. The fiasco of creating a method to run any command with escalated sudo privelages just because they wanted to make the install easier that remains after install was absolutely mind blowing. Those kinds of things are unforgivable.

If browser performance is bad but app performance is good (and I agree that my experience with the app is actually pretty good), then it is a bad sign that the exploit is in the app, and not the browser version.

Also the UI sucks. It doesn't blend nicely with my system. It looks like a sore thumb Windows 3.0 app or quack-age MacOS app in the midst of a futuristic OS.

Yes! Like there's a required two clicks to leave a call, you can't trust if it will start video on or off, the menu bar hides by default! The UX is horrible.

The 2-click to leave is aweful. Sure, accidental leaving can be annoying. How about don't put the button near anything else that might need clicking so that it's much less likely to be accidentally clicked.

Having to download and use an executable at all is ridiculous and half the reason they have so many security problems.

It also has an unexpectedly great Linux app, IMO.

Agree and have a similar experience so I use Jitsi https://jitsi.org/ instead and recommend it. If clients insist I simply ask they enable joining from a web client, otherwise unable to join. Jitsi works well and find it odd how remarkable mindsets become locked into options regardless of the accessibility and benefit of alternatives (great material for comedy, psychosocial study, etc). From React to iOS default apps to Zoom, it's an odd disadvantage of our human condition.

The browser experience is pretty decent IMO. And unlike, say, MS Teams, at least it works on all platforms with a reasonably modern browser.

I was shocked to find that on Windows, Teams refuses to run in any browser except Edge. On Linux, it runs quite happily under Chromium. It's the worst sort of anti-competitive behavior, in my view.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/get-clients#...

IE11 (ew), old Edge (ew), Chromium Edge and Chrome are fully supported. Newest Safari has limited support, and only Firefox and older Safari versions are the only ones explicitly not supported.

I use it in Firefox regularly, and just checked and it runs in chrome too. Weird...

Same. The whole interface is god awful. And it almost always dishonors my OS audio input/output preferences by default. The web client always downgrades my camera resolution for some reason, and messes up its aspect ratio. Plus the security problems.

Zoom has a history of nasty security issues, does shady business with China and bought and killed Keybase. It's a shitty company not even considering their software.

Which goes to tell you how good their software is. It is better than anything other companies have to offer for video conference calls with many participants and screen sharing, which is why our university is using it after we had evaluated all competitors last year in April.

Didn't they route calls through China for no apparent reason as well?

Not without improving the speed of light.

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