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Comment by wsinks | Hacker News Reader

Dang, Webex is still that bad for you? Is it because you're using company's instances where it's more locked down and they're on older code?

I know it's not perfect, but it's pretty reliable for me (and full disclosure, I work for a different subsidiary of Cisco - but I also try to be pretty critical of it since I'm close to it)

I don't use Zoom a ton, but I've experienced what feels like a similar amount of sluggishness and AV issues as I have on Webex. At this point I know I'm a bit too close to have a useful anecdote, I'm just surprised that Webex is still put in the same group as Teams / Hangouts / GTM.

Again, not trying to sway you, just understand a bit better.

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I found Webex to be quite a lot worse than Zoom in my limited experience. I attended a few IEEE presentations hosted on the platform. Audio didn't connect smoothly and needed a few restarts. The talk was constantly interrupted by a chiming noise whenever a person joined or left the meeting. I remember finding a configuration setting for this but the hosts didn't see my message (another bad feature), as this was a meeting-wide setting rather than a client one. Even if it were configurable per-user, that chime turned on is an unexpected and intrusive default setting.

Beyond that, I couldn't see the presented content in full-screen. There was a lot of junk in the form of perpetual UI elements for the "fullscreen mode".

These seemed like pretty fundamental misses for the platform to make.

I attended a webex earlier this year and I found the experience was far better than Zoom. The audio and video quality was better, and also the presentation controls were much more sophisticated.

this entry beep is a typical example of security vs. usability. The entry beep is meant for everyone to know if someone joined, even if they have joined using a phone only. It is also configurable. I think it was a huge mistake from cisco to make it a default though, the security benefit is too small. In the latest version is is now automatically disabled after 25 participants I believe, so they heard the feedback (took their time though).

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