How to automatically close those annoying “Launch Meeting” tabs from Zoom | Hacker News Reader

How to automatically close those annoying “Launch Meeting” tabs from Zoom

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60 pointsmooreds72 comments

It's ridiculous that you should have to install a third party plugin to do this. It's not that hard for Zoom to add this as a preference users can control.

Zoom has terrible UI/UX. Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout, or how clicking the button to open the chat moves the toolbar, so that clicking a second time (to try to close the chat) ends up requesting to record the meeting.

Oh, and then there are the privacy concerns.

Those are literally the exact complaints I was thinking of when you said terrible UI/UX. It's so ridiculous that I have to mash escape when someone shares screen. I thought what my previous company used was not the best, but if zoom is the alternative I guess I misjudged.

There is a setting to disable the auto-fullscreen behavior, at least

It not only changes the size, it steals focus. I work a lot during meetings!

Also annoying when sharing a screen, why mess with my layout when I have multiple screens and zoom is on the screen I'm not sharing? I'd like to not go through hoops to see those I'm talking with, and having to find the stop sharing or mute buttons on a completely new (and hidden) spot.

Still, my new employer uses Google Meet which is even more shit. Grinds the computer to a halt, especially if not using Chrome.

I prefer meet, but I do use a Chromium based browser.

Is it Zoom or poor URI scheme handling on the part of OS/browser vendors? The leftover open tabs aren’t unique to Zoom.

I imagine an app vendor is in a tough spot. They need a URI that can open if the user has the app or not, open the right app version for different on prem installs, and offer a web version as a backup.

On the other hand, the Zoom or other app vendor page seems to recieve a signal that the app was launched as it often changes state. Maybe some marketing person thought a feedback page was more effective than window.close()?

It appears deliberate on Zoom's part, they often use that page to advertise something after the Zoom session ends.

> Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout

I share your rage. Zoom is garbage, though I hear Teams is a close second. I know people hate on Google now, but Meet works fine in a browser with no fuss.

So interesting how different people's expierences are. Every time I've used Meet it feels like my system is trying to mine crypto and I find some thing I can do in Zoom that works 25% worse. At least we can all agree that we're glad it's not WebEx

Depending on who the meeting is with, at work I use Zoom, Teams, and WebEx. Teams is so much better than the other two that I can barely think of any complaints about it (note that Zoom is itself also a huge leap better than WebEx). The only one that comes to mind is that it doesn't play nice with Bluetooth devices.

And the AI-based noise cancellation that comes with Meet is incredible. It gets completely rid of even the worst mechanism keyboard noises without affecting speech quality at all, which no other solution seems to be able to do. Significant remote office quality of life improvement :-)

I use Discord for remote work and it has something called Krisp noise cancelling that works as incredibly, if you're interested in other clients.

Krisp is garbage compared to Nvidia's free Voice RTX algorithm or Google Meet's. You also have to pay for it.

If you are on Windows and have a recent nvidia gpu, their "Broadcast" app is phenomenal at this. Their noise cancellation hides my treadmill sounds and clicky keyboard while I remain clear and, as a bonus, the background blur actually looks like real bokeh which seems to make people think I'm running a much higher end setup than I am.

No such thing for Linux :( I'd love to use it with Zoom.

The big benefit of Meet is it works anywhere, even phones, since it happens server side.

Meet is by far the best UX of the bunch, but it’s a hell of a resource hog. Amusingly less so in Safari than Chrome, but even so it still turns my 16” MBP into a space heater.

Funny, zoom's a terrible resource hog for me (running the client via flatpak). It opens an incredibly high number of files and processes. Google meet is just a browser tab.

(Oh, plus zoom don't support screenshare in kwin-wayland yet, although I can't blame them for that.)

I mean don’t get me wrong, Zoom isn’t exactly ascetic on macOS either! I think Meet is just at the mercy of the browser on desktop.

> though I hear Teams is a close second

UI polish aside, Teams + Office + Outlook was the best experience I have ever had at work.

Now I'm forced to use a mishmash of Zoom, Slack, and Google, and the friction between all of them is just maddening.

> but Meet works fine in a browser with no fuss.

Not on Firefox for me, lately. The last few times someone invited me to one, I had to switch to Chrome.

It mostly works for me in Firefox but the screen sharing experience is degraded and I pretty much have to use Chrome if I don't want someome to tell me "your screen isn't updating anymore."

It is definitely my preferred meeting app though. You just give someone a link; no install, no fuss, no muss.

> It is definitely my preferred meeting app though. You just give someone a link; no install, no fuss, no muss.

I like Jitsi for that same reason: any meet.jit.si link is a meeting, just make one up or let the site do it for you. Nothing needed but a browser.

I had an interview on jitsi, my face was inversed and it put me off big time. I couldnt find a way to hide my picture too. It was the opposite of what I’m used to seeing in a mirror

The defaults, as far as I can tell, do work like a mirror. There's a "flip" option on the "..." menu, if you want to invert that. And there's a "hide self view" option, as well as an arrow to hide the small version in the corner.

I use Teams in the browser to take calls as a guest with clients who use Teams. I've never had an issue.

> Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout

That’s a preference you can turn off…

It is (on most clients anyway, I think maybe only recently added on their Linux client) but the default is wrong. Unbidden surprise fullscreen is a terrible idea.

> Don't get me started on how other users sharing their screens changes MY window layout

You might not like it, but that's exactly the sort of "just make it work at all costs" feature that made Zoom popular in the first place.

They're basically trying to minimise the "can everybody see this?" nonsense that video conferencing is famous for. I think it's a perfectly reasonable trade-off.

There should probably be a way to opt out though.

Yes this is so annoying. My company provides professional development workshops for the specific field we are in (Language Interpreting & Translation), I am often the moderator of the workshop. I am pretty much familiar with Zoom and that kind of thing happens so often. I have to reposition the windows the way I want it and have to do that all over again. I found it best to use OBS with Zoom, this minimize the layout changes since I am only "screen sharing" to my OBS, and my OBS have various sources like PowerPoint slide and videos. I have not uses screen sharing in Zoom ever since I uses OBS. Zoom is using OBS Vitural Camera and I can transition to different scene in ease without worrying that Zoom change the layout again.

The annoying meeting tabs are intentional, Zoom is going to display ads there for the free tier.

So Zoom won't have any intentions to add a preference to remove them.

This might be a lesson for us all, if there's an obviously annoying UI/UX aspect, its intentionally being kept for monetization reasons.

Installing random browser extensions seems like not a great idea from a security point of view. Just hit ctrl/cmd + w to close the tab

I agree.

My issue with browser extensions is, even if the author and code are trustworthy now, what's to stop the extension from being sold to unscrupulous folks years in the future?

The problem with manually having to close the tab is not the effort required to close it but then mental hiccup it causes when my brain opens my browser and now has to figure out which tab I was trying to go back to

That's fair, but the actual extension <https://github.com/kskashyap94/zoom-auto-close> is like ten lines of code. If you don't trust it not to change into something malicious, create a local copy.

It's just closing tabs after a bit of time, and scoping that code to Zoom URLs...

Agreed, userscripts are the better approach. There's at least three on here for closing the tab, I haven't tested them:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/by-site/zoom.us

If you refuse to install the desktop client, and just take calls in the browser, then you can close the tab when the meeting ends.

Yeah, few people seem to know you can join any Zoom call using your browser (WebRTC). I refuse to install their spyware.

Zoom offers multiple tools to enforce permissions on attendance:

- Passwords

- Meeting host approves anyone joining

I think you're misunderstanding what GP is saying. They're not saying you can join arbitrary meetings that you aren't invited to; they're saying that if you're invited to a meeting, you can join through the browser instead of using the desktop app.

Whoops, completely misunderstood the response!

That said their browser implementation is even worse than the app. I mean I can't even change to a gallery view when using the browser. I'm really amazed how zoom became the quasi default for meeting software. While I'm not a big fan of teams, it works much better for this use case. Jitsi had some issues with firefox and safari at the beginning, which I think caused many people to dismiss it.

Which is not always feasible. Some companies enforce a no-WebRTC policy, so that installing the app winds up being the only possible solution.

Certainly true, but amusing. Presumably the primary rationale for a no-WebRTC policy is to avoid WebRTC leaks? In which case installing Zoom is a case of preferring "the devil you know over the devil you don't know".

> Presumably the primary rationale for a no-WebRTC policy is to avoid WebRTC leaks?

I doubt corporate IT departments even care about "WebRTC leaks" (ie. your LAN IP getting leaked). Knowing that your computer is at 192.168.1.123 doesn't help attackers much. What's far more likely is that their networks only allow TCP connections, because that's all their firewalls/middleboxes/proxies support.

> Knowing that your computer is at 192.168.1.123 doesn't help attackers much

One can reconstruct your subnet scheme with a handful internal IP addresses, allowing them to locate potential targets faster once they get into your network, making attacks more efficient ("oh, so these guys have some vulnerable clients in this /16, it's probably dev, and I see there's another /24, which looks like prod").

What's amusing about that? Preferring a whitelisted set of programs rather than allowing users to run code from any source is precisely how most security policies work.

Including Zoom in that whitelist is amusing because it has such a miserable reputation for security.

if you use i3wm (linux tiling window manager) I use this to remove those annoying popups when someone shares screen on zoom

    for_window [title="^zoom$" class="[zoom]*"] floating enabled
    for_window [title="^zoom$" class="[zoom]*"] move scratchpad

Prefix your code lines with four spaces instead of backtick fences for monospace on HN. That said, thank you for this! It drives me crazy that it reshuffles my windows.

Thanks, this needs to go into the Archwiki or somewhere where lots of users land!

I keep running into this annoyance on every Zoom meeting.

I recently blogged about this at https://www.jvt.me/posts/2021/12/02/bspwm-zoom-float/ but that's a fair shout that it could also go into the wiki

People here seem convinced this is negligence or malice on Zoom's part, but how do you propose they fix it? window.close() doesn't work in a tab. Launching the external app doesn't always succeed so if they did it all with redirects they couldn't tell you when it failed. And since Zoom links are usually opened from some other app that uses target=_blank there's going to be some tab open anyway, better the zoom tab than some confusing blank tab.

I'm annoyed by then too, but it isn't Zoom's fault.

iframes

They could fix it by improving the UI for joining a meeting so that the indirection through the browser was not the best choice. For example, the Zoom application could easily accept the URL directly on drag-and-drop or copy-paste.

That tab can be useful if you need to relaunch the zoom meeting (after a free 30m meeting ends, after accidentally exiting, or if you have a more complicated a/v setup and the audio devices didn't take). Simply remove "#success" at the end of the URL, and hit enter; it will relaunch without you having to go back into your calendar to find the meeting invite.

The meeting should be in your zoom history at that point.

Thanks— I’ve never given that a proper look!

Interesting how the screenshot is Safari on Mac-OS, whereas "Just install an extension called Zoom Auto Close. It's available for Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox."

There is no mentioning of Safari in that list...

The screenshot is actually of Chrome.

Looks like Chrome on macOS to me?

Alternatively, use Choosy: https://www.choosyosx.com/

I've used a few variations of this in the past and seem to run into a similar issue with Firefox: if you go to a different vanity URL (someothercompany.zoom.us), the tab will close before you can authorize the site to open the zoommtg links (the specific DNS address gets approved instead of *.zoom.us)

So is Zoom spyware, or not? I am legitimately asking.

No, unless you consider ever SaaS spyware.

So yes.

is HN spyware?

I'd never trust it with any data I care about. HN doesn't even let you delete your account with post history.

What about citizen labs conclusion that it's not safe for secrets?

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...

Win friends at work and share this. Those tabs are super annoying because they clutter up an already cluttered bar of tabs…

Wow, it's just what I wanted. How'd you know!? Thanks!

ugh, why should we need a browser extension to achieve this sort of thing.

As if browser weren't already bloated enough without taking extensions into account..

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